Killing Them Softly (2012)

Last of the Independents

 written and directed by Andrew Dominik

starring Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini,

Ray Liotta, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn

Writer-director Andrew Dominik senses your itch for a bitter, black-coffee essay on the haplessness of small-time criminality and gives it a damn good scratch. Killing Them Softly comes gift-wrapped for all your whiskey-sodden bad moods — a grim, colorless, dirty-joke-on-the-way-to-the-electric-chair little yarn, adapted from a 1974 George V. Higgins novel, that's probably truer to the squalid, unfurnished lives of low-rent heist men and muscle for hire than any of the hip dialogue-laden romps we've come to associate with such characters.

Economic crisis befalls the underworld on the eve of Barack Obama's election to the White House: a pair of masked gunmen have just knocked over a poker game run by Mafia stooge Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). Thanks to Markie's big mouth, everyone and his grandma knows he set up the robbery of one of his previous games — he laughs it off as if it were a locker-room anecdote about some fat girl he'd drunkenly nailed on spring break. Now, the mob is worried that, with the specter of yet another robbery hanging in the air — as well as the perception that nothing's being done about it — their games look about as attractive to the average high roller as a one-armed whore with the clap. Measures must be taken to restore confidence. Markie — though he's not responsible for this latest transgression — needs to be dealt with. Enter hit man extraordinaire Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt). Cogan and his buttoned-up mob liaison Driver (Richard Jenkins) add the real perpetrators to the hit list: smacked-out Aussie dog-napper Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) and jittery Frankie (Scoot McNairy), plus Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola of The Sopranos), the cleaning store owner who set the whole plan in motion. And if Jackie could stay within the meager confines of his recession-era budget and get the job done as quickly and as cleanly as possible, well, the bosses sure would appreciate it.

One needn't ponder why Dominik chose to lard Higgins' pulp-fiction roast with lumpy political-analogy gravy that parallels gangsters scrambling to fix a glitch in their easy-money machine with Obama & Co. bailing out Wall Street. (Reassuring soundbites from Dubya and Barry O bleat ironic counterpoint from every bar television and car radio.) Pitt's Jackie sums the film up for us: America is a business, he says, and cold, hard commerce is the engine driving every aspect of it, from business dealings and political maneuvers to — one presumes — personal relationships, marriages, friendships, whatever. Nothing is for "the good of the people" without first being good for the pockets of those who pull the strings — those sainted yet deeply hypocritical men named Thomas Jefferson or Barack Jesus Christ Obama, who sire slave children while stirring men with words of equality, or who preach sacrifice for the hand-to-mouth masses while shitting hundred-dollar bills and wiping their asses with fifties. No less a backdrop than Obama's election-night victory speech accompanies Jackie's nifty monologue, and it's followed immediately by "Money (That's What I Want)" chirping away on the soundtrack — subtle, this film ain't.

Then again, sledgehammers have their charms, too. Jackie explains his preference for "killing 'em softly" — i.e. from a distance, untouched by the complications of getting close to a sobbing, pissing-his-pants victim who's pleading for his life — and it calls to mind any number of lit candles held menacingly close to the country's paper ideals by button-pushing D.C. bureaucrats who never have to actually look at anyone, be they casualties in Iraq, the victims of umpteen U.S.-supported dictatorships, or tomorrow's fathers in army fatigues, sent to their graves halfway around the globe under the flimsiest of justifications. Now, though, as never before, the tide has turned inward; basic survival for ordinary taxpayers seems the rock of Sisyphus. America eats its young, as the Funkadelic album told us, and with employment rates and average household incomes still looking at the toilet and deciding to go for a nice, cool swim, the pickings are scrawnier than ever.

Killing Them Softly is the gangster film that crowns our era of downsized expectations with a king's fit. Dominik drains it of passion and all but the most bone-dry gallows humor, strips it to the barest of crime-plot mechanics without the slightest pretense toward larger-than-life outlaw excitement — or that hoary stand-by "honor among thieves." It's like a Tarantino script directed by someone who's seen too much to pretend — 97 minutes of watching dumb, sick animals totter blindly about as we sit there, waiting for the bear trap of their inevitable doom to close around their ankles. Ray Liotta's Markie has a bulls-eye on his forehead from the moment we meet him — the poor schmuck — and not a damn thing can erase it: not his poker-room chumminess with the fellas, not his essential harmlessness, not the money his games have raked in for the big boys over the years. He's puffy, a soft-boiled egg without even the protection of a shell, sodden from drink and fattened up on the assumption of good will that he thinks his years of harmless mook-ness have bought him. Even the goons tossing him through plate glass windows and pounding him until he returns his lunch don't exactly dislike the guy. But it's business, y'see — Mahatma-fucking-Gandhi himself couldn't stem the tide of ass-whoop, were he to come up short on his count at the end of the day. Markie's every luckless fuck-nuts hanging on by fraying threads of amiability that you've ever heard about if you hung around certain neighborhoods — you shake your head and laugh when your friend tells you about the latest stunt he's pulled and how they had to drag him into the back room and give 'im another beatin' before they fixed him a drink for his troubles. And then, your friend's telling you about the low turnout for his wake, and what a shame it was about that guy — and you shake your head and exhale into stale air. Some schmucks are better left forgotten.

James Gandolfini’s Mickey, flown in from Back East to assist in taking out the offending parties, shuffles off the plane like an overfed calf who'd downed his last swallow of Scotch and said, "why not?" after the universe tapped him on the shoulder and nodded toward the slaughterhouse. He's the career gangster as walking dead, a professional eraser worn to a nub, as numb and inadequate to the task of one more go-round as the cock he winds up pushing on half the whores in town. Gandolfini's exuded a certain weariness for most of his career. Trace that straight line running through his cavalcade of bearish thugs and natural born killers-for-hire and what you find is an actor sighing in resignation at the kinds of roles that his bulk and his physiognomy have confined him to — and yet, aware of the lived-in verisimilitude that he brings to these parts like none of his contemporaries. (His stabs at ordinary working guys tend to fit like suits made for smaller, lesser actors — they need tailoring, expansion.) It's a deal with the devil he seems to strike with each grinning, Jersey-esque sociopath he signs up for: yeah, I'll play another gangster, another alpha-male hard case, but I'm gonna give you a guy at the ass end of the life, a guy with a fate somebody long ago fired into the back of his head — it's just taken all these years to finally cut through all the booze and pussy. Mickey's obvious reference point would seem to be an older, wearier Virgil from Tony Scott's electric True Romance. (And it's a thrill to see Gandolfini and Pitt reunited here.) But Virgil wasn't yet ready for the pasture — he might have been "too old" to think to check under a bed for a suitcase full of coke but he could still get it up for the finer details of the job. Beating Alabama to a pulp was spontaneous bathroom-stall sex for a man walled off from all normal human sensation; sheer fire-hydrant release after the foreplay of Alabama's cock-tease of refusal and his Charles Whitman "bitch of the bunch" speech.

What we're really looking at is a what-if rendition of Tony Soprano ten years after onion rings at Holsten's, ten years into ever costlier payoffs for his wife's complicity, skull-fucked into a dead-soul stupor by the nightmare of watching his useless children morph into the people he always feared they'd be. (Mickey's got all the Tony mannerisms, the "whattya gonna do.") This Mickey's all torn up over women — he can make a young Jewish hooker with a great ass sound like the saddest thing in the world — and he bleeds his depression all over Jackie with a blow-by-blow of his wife threatening him with divorce, and his acceptance of it, as he's sucking down every drink in sight. Jackie's staring at him, wondering what the hell he's going to do with this morose, angry bastard, and it hits him right then and there: Mickey is him in twenty years, a hollowed-out prisoner of his own lonesome-drifter ethos, unable to sustain a life beyond the gun. It's the only kind of final chapter ever written for guys like him — no "happy," just an ending. (Jackie concedes his beer to his hard-drinking future self — he'll need it by then.) That realization spurs the only small mercy we see from Jackie — clemency wrapped in hard-bitten practicality — and it's part and parcel of a character who'd balked earlier at the notion of dishing out a prolonged thrashing to a man who's already marked for death. (Shades of American mealy-mouthing about torture, I presume.)

That's not to suggest that Pitt imbues Jackie with anything so damnably Hollywood as a "heart of gold." Jackie plies his trade with an unhesitating, face-to-face efficiency that delivers on the promise of his intro, set to Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around," and utterly curdles the memory of his I-kill-'em-from-a-distance self-flattery. Nothing creases the brow of our slicked-back man in black — not the whimpering of a shotgunned man coughing and moaning through his final seconds of life as Jackie steps out of the darkness to put the cherry on his handiwork, not the casual necessity of eliminating an only witness with a bit of cranial reconstruction at point-blank range. Initially, I wrote off the slo-mo sequence of a Jackie hit set to Ketty Lester's "Love Letters" as pointlessly over-stylized, its bullets-as-love-letters conceit lifted wholesale — and rather cutely — from David Lynch's Blue Velvet. But there's a dazzling near-beauty to the way that the hit is presented — to the way that Jackie eases forward into the rain like a conjured spirit, gun-first, to the way that each detail of the hit is offered up for our fetishistic dissection. It's in the way that time distends itself to lovingly caress the clockwork mechanics of that steely piece of modern manhood — the release of the hammer, the kickback, all in trance-inducing extreme close-up with a magnified, Lynchian sound-effects rendering. It's in the perfect hole that a bullet makes in a pebbled mosaic of shattering glass, in the raindrops plinking off of spent shell casings like the kiss of a pebble skipping across a slumbering lake. It's in Jackie's target — frozen in a surreal stop-motion tableau of helplessness, hand impotently raised to stop the unstoppable. The whole sequence spins off into a kind of fever-dream hypnosis forged by a filmmaker in mad adolescent love with the magician's tricks at his disposal — it’s like a short-film treatise on the destructibility of human flesh fused with crash test dummy footage shot by David Fincher. It becomes its own grace note for Jackie, a paean to pure professionalism that morphs into a dreamy eroticism — the only real passion a cinder-hearted prick like Jackie can feel.

I suspect that this film's reputation may grow in the years to come, even if what it looks like at the moment is a minor work in the Dominik filmography — say, a stopgap E.P. after the sprawling, talent-defining double album that was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Dominik's channeling the Gritty '70s with a Nixon-era they're-all-scumbags cynicism unfashionable in today's Democrat-besotted Hollywood and he filters it through the steely, desaturated colors and depersonalized urban anywheresville of David Fincher's Fight Club. It's a modern-day answer to Shampoo, really — a political allegory, set on the eve of a divisive American president's rise to power, that contrasts the grubby, self-centered goings-on of an American society in crisis with the backdrop of lofty rhetoric and empty promises made by the politicians who set the moral tone for all of us. To the callow bed-hoppers of 1968 Beverly Hills in the former, it was Tricky Dick Nixon — the evil spirit conjured forth by the me-firstness and personal corruption of the Southern California that gave him his initial prominence in politics. In Dominik's vision, it's the malfeasance and woeful mismanagement of an American government gone completely, bloodlessly corporate. Either way, it's a pointed finger at the people in the audience. Little wonder, then, that such a hard swig of rotgut was so utterly bypassed in our wine cooler era of "hope and change."

Dominik uses Pitt here the way he used his Jesse James: as his enigmatic Grim Reaper figure, the eerily unruffled, calmly fatalistic Zen center around which everyone else's panicked flailing and deer-in-the-crosshairs confusion revolves. Jackie's the graying ghost of an America That Was, evil flipside to a whole generation of unwavering, principled men who dedicated their lives to a craft. That craft, that job, was the sum total of who these men were, and they simply got down to business with no dawdling and little fanfare, with no expectation of a thank-you beyond full payment for services rendered. And what thanks does our Jackie get, this last of a dying breed, this true professional in our castrated modern era of loose-lipped amateurs and outsourced labor? He's saddled with double-talking bosses whose only concern is cutting corners. He's stuck picking up the slack for guys who just can't cut it. He's reduced to bitching with his colleague in a deserted airport bar like some middle-aged paper-shuffler who's in town for a conference about how to maximize productivity for the coming fiscal quarter, for God's sake. America eats its young, and leaves the bones for its working men to pick.

©2013 Scott Is NOT A Professional Film Critic

Django Unchained (2012)

Roots, Bloody Roots

written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz,

Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson

Guns on the table: is Tarantino using a shameful period of American history as so much paint to splash upon his hipster pasticheur's canvas, as the Spike Lees and Armond Whites of the world have charged? Is he, in fact, turning the subjugation and mental colonization of a race of people into just another candy-colored Panavision playground for his boundless, grindhouse-fed imagination to romp through?

Of course, he is – and it puts him in the company of approximately every dramatist or storyteller who's ever existed.

Imagine, if you will, a human existence without the eternal Godzilla's foot of war and enmity between nations that looms over us in every era, threatening to stamp us into oblivion. Imagine hearts shielded from the pin-pricks of bigotry and callousness and brotherly betrayal; no random shootings, robberies gone awry or crumbling inner-city war zones blasted daily into our consciousness by op-ed pieces and chirpy anchorwomen. What, then, would our future artistes and essayists on the human condition use to fuel their plaudit-inspiring, name-making masterworks? How many little gold statuettes and industry back-slaps have been dished out on the deaths of soldiers at Normandy or grunts blown apart by Vietnamese land mines, while we swooned over all that Method-acted agony on the screen and inhaled another fistful of Goobers? Does one suppose that the Bard paused in the middle of writing Macbeth to weep for poor souls ground underfoot in man's eternal headlong rush to power? Human suffering is art, and the Tarantino of Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds – comic-book moral intelligence notwithstanding – is no more inherently objectionable than Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam restaging the David Berkowitz killings or Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski slapping wheels under the Holocaust and riding that sucker straight into Oscarville.

What gets folks all indignant about The King of the Fanboys tackling a Serious Subject like slavery is the same thing that makes his work crackle with a charge unmatched in our dickless modern era: he refuses to put a neat little bow on his intentions for the guardians of human suffering by ladling on the strings, standing back at a respectable distance and putting his sense of humor on ice. He refuses (is unable?) to treat the slave trade as any less of a springboard to rip-roaring action-movie nirvana than botched jewel heists, Mexican standoffs in diners or Uma Thurman and her samurai sword taking on a squad of assassins – hence, the accusations of cloistered geek-boy insensitivity.

But he's not wrong, in essence. To try and understand with twenty-first century minds a world where biblically justified chattel was as intrinsic to daily life as child labor and the outdoor commode is to circle endlessly around a cold black void of the unknowable. What might as well be dystopian sci-fi from the unbridgeable distance of neat schoolbook summaries or dusty daguerreotypes flashed upon in PBS documentaries becomes flesh and blood when couched in the grammar of a big Christmas-season revenge flick. Ancient history merges with the present-day narrative, the freedom of a Nat Turner becomes as tangible a hero’s quest as Batman cleaning up Gotham. Culture-wide catharsis beckons at the pop of an overloaded squib.

That's not to say that Tarantino isn't indulging in the usual Hollywood self-flattery. Your friend who still quotes lines from Pulp Fiction will swear to you that Django is an examination of how every facet of an ostensibly civilized society both benefits from and does its part to sustain institutionalized inequality. Tarantino's not that deep, though – not intentionally, anyway – so what we actually get is a rock-'em-sock-'em Sergio Corbucci/blaxploitation mash-up where modern-day liberals are time-machined back to the mean old past to wreak sweet, bloody havoc on the not-with-it-ness of our backwards forebears. No one with an investment in historical accuracy will mistake Christoph Waltz's kindly, über-progressive Dr. King Schultz for anything but an emissary of our present age of enlightenment, what with his pangs of guilt about buying Django like a horse and his blithe naïveté about riding through town with a black man at his side, while clueless as to what all the slack-jawed yahoos are staring at. His climactic Wild Bunch gesture – a Pike Bishop middle finger in the face of one last compromise – completes his canonization.

Obviously, then, Schultz is our Tarantino surrogate – the lone white swan amidst rotten-tooth redneck ducklings, the white man who gets it, the sole beneficiary of divine wisdom and madcap inspiration who atones for the sins of his race by freeing a black man from the chains of iniquity and molding him into an instrument of heroic vengeance that echoes the legends of his youth. (The Nibelungenlied for Schultz, Coffy and Fred Williamson flicks for the future masthead of the S.S. Weinstein.) It's interracial male bonding not as a balm for lingering social hostilities, not even as a Tarantino-esque tweak of buddy-movie conventions, but as a fundamentally white male artist's assertion of continued relevance in the age of identity politics; an application for renewal of the ghetto pass Tarantino first earned by sporting a backwards Kangol and telling the media of his mother's black boyfriends and his lifelong hard-on for Pam Grier.

I wonder, though: what happened to the mad bomber of Miramax who played around with form and context like a mischievous brat who'd just received the history of cinema for a Christmas toy? Whither goeth the pop revolutionary who delighted in taking stock genre characters and dropping them into the real world with its frustrating refusal to stick to the script? When a pair of bad-ass hit men like Pulp Fiction's Jules and Vincent find themselves faced with the consequences of careless firearm handling in an everyman's L.A. full of observant cops and friends who want your ass gone before the wife gets home, it's how they extricate themselves that epitomized the singularity of Tarantino's gift – the way that their B-movie programming short-circuits at life's improv and sends them scrambling out of the cineplex toward a kind of shaky humanity. "Movies are great," the video store clerk-turned-overnight sensation seemed to be telling us. "But at some point, you've gotta grow up." Jackie Brown's sublime meditation on aging and regret only furthered the perception.

Now his gift's in service of cinematic wish fulfillment, righting the wrongs of history. The bad-boy president of the N-word Fan Club is now defined by his eagerness to liberate himself from the shackles of white maleness and soothe his chapped ankles in the waters of grrl power, anti-anti-Semitism and black hipness. Problem is, that eagerness has blinded him to how underwritten his totems of payback-against-The-Man tend to be. (Unless, of course, he meant to make Basterds the first World War II movie in which the Nazis are complex, three-dimensional magnets for audience identification while the Jews are little more than bloodthirsty comic relief.)

Jamie Foxx, as Django, is supposedly the centerpiece of the Unchained saga, and yet – grim irony – he winds up about three-fifths of a fully sketched lead. (Waltz is the true star of the film.) One guesses that Tarantino almost didn't need to color him in: our disgust for slavery is enough to have us cheering on Django's rebirth as the ebony Siegfried. (Just as motherhood in Kill Bill was the trigger for our investment in The Bride.) And Tarantino was likely motivated by the threadbare characterization and shadowy man-with-no-name aura of any number of spaghetti western protagonists. Still, he somewhat glosses over the psychological scars of a life in bondage by having Django go so easily from human property to damn-the-system avenger and crackshot marksman.

We need to feel, as well as see, the spectacle of a black man rising from the prehistoric racial milieu of 1858 and pointing his shotgun toward a better tomorrow. We need to see the nuts and bolts of nothing less than a man's mind being molded. The potentially fatal audacity of learning to put bullets in white men for money, of developing a ruse in order to waltz into the fourth biggest plantation in Mississippi and reclaim his wife, needs to be as eye-opening and as consciousness-transforming for Django as the contact with other lifeforms in Close Encounters of the Third Kind – he's discovering new planets. Instead, we get an amusing scene of Django decked out in Little Lord Fauntleroy regalia and a nifty montage set to Jim Croce.

Foxx is less a pure actor than he is a movie star and comedian (call it The Eddie Murphy Factor), so he keeps us at arm’s length, never truly disappears into the character the way a Don Cheadle or a Chiwetel Ejiofor might have. Tarantino, in a recent interview with Henry Louis Gates, spoke of having to coax Foxx into the mindset needed for Django – the spirit-killing degradation and utter smallness internalized by a man who's used to life as a farm implement. But Foxx doesn’t do "smallness." Here, as in most of his performances (Michael Mann's excellent Collateral being an exception), he's too tethered to his public award-show image of super cool Jamie Foxx-ness, too locked into a shell of 2012 black male hardness that refuses all hints of vulnerability and bristles with anachronistic indignation. It's a variation on the same false note that plagued Spielberg's Lincoln, with its 1865 black soldiers proudly addressing not just any white man, mind you, but the President of the United States of America – and with far too much direct eye contact and (to echo Richard Pryor) "bass" in their voices, to boot.

Here, you can see that hip-hop-appropriate I-ain't-no-muthafuckin'-slave-ness bubbling up long before the narrative has a chance to account for it: on the plantation of the Don Johnson character as Django pumps a hole in the leering sadist who once reveled in whipping Django's wife, or at the beginning as Django struts forward to grab the coat from a dead white man and put his weight on the mangled leg of the dead man's brother. It's there as Django cracks wise and simmers with animus during his and Schultz's visit to the Candie Land plantation under the guise of purchasing mandingo fighters – and it's enough to smother whatever suspension of disbelief we've been able to muster between all the cutesy spaghetti western speed-zooms and flashbacks filtered to look like a faded film print from 1968. It's an admission of this misplaced modernity when Tarantino drops 2Pac and Rick Ross on the soundtrack. And because we haven't fully bought into his kitsch-laden panorama of the past, the choice doesn't jar us nearly as much as, say, Peter Gabriel's synth-drums over the opening battle in Gangs of New York.

It’s worth noting that Django only bonds with Schultz the hip Tarantino stand-in rather than with any black characters. Despite his flair for the verbiage of salt-and-pepper interaction, Tarantino has no real idea how black people might actually relate to one another. (Jackie Brown's tête-à-têtes with Ordell aside, and that's in large part due to Elmore Leonard's source novel – in which she was white.) We keep waiting for Django to offer a helping hand, some ray of hope – something befitting a hero – to his fellow black men as he prepares to ride off into his preordained sunset of ass-kicking righteousness. They stare up at him like a living Greek myth whose legend they'll undoubtedly spread to others, and he looks back at them – knowing yet dispassionate, a god made flesh. And then? Tarantino seems to be nudging us toward something larger, some sparking of a communal flame – perhaps a plantation-wide revolt – that might thrust his fantasia into a broader historical context, that might use his worship of the "bad muthafucka" archetype to scrape decades of Hollywood-applied makeup from the bloodstained, genocide-blemished face of American history.

But nothing comes of it. Was Leonardo DiCaprio's plantation heir Calvin Candie right when he pegged Django as a one-in-ten-thousand rarity among biologically docile blacks? It's as if Tarantino spent all his capital on enriching Django's relationship with a white man and had none left to flesh out the sense of community that undoubtedly existed among slaves, even under the shit-encrusted boot of captivity. Save for a brief, enlightening throwaway of Samuel Jackson's Stephen joking with the kitchen help, we get no hints of the cobbled-from-scraps culture – the humor, the secret communication – that managed to nourish blacks in spite of slavery's every attempt to sever them from human connection and turn them into self-regulating extensions of Massa's whip. There's nothing from Tarantino, that eternally bowed figure at the monument of superficial black coolness, that even nods in the direction of slaves' capacity for aiding one another. Rebellion other than Django's crackles at the margins of the narrative but it's ill-planned – and we do need a sacrificial lamb or two to help showcase the depths of hillbilly depravity – so it's easily quashed. Django, though, has the good fortune to have Schultz; he's given agency and on-the-job training by a Magic Caucasian figure who feels sorry for the poor devil, thus, he triumphs. It's retroactive affirmative action; the auspices of the hipster's White Negro impulse jumping back in time with the cutups from Dave Chappelle's "Playa Haters in Time" skit and rewriting Roots.

As with Basterds, though, the real meat of Django Unchained is around the edges. Laura Cayouette, as Candie's sister (and probable lover) Lara, is a satirist's sketch of blushing Southern-belle coquettishness; Susan George in Mandingo minus the storm clouds of scorned-woman spite. Walton Goggins, as Candie Land henchman Billy Crash, is our grinning death's head of keep-the-niggers-in-their-place-ism – a bud of privileged intransigence that would shortly blossom into the Confederacy and the Klan. (By the way, Quentin, 1858 is three years from the start of the Civil War, not two.) He's in a constant, self-perpetuating fit of arousal: he can't wait to kill you in the most agonizing way possible, and he wants to know if it turns you on as much as it does him. A cineaste could die smiling from all the great character actors that keep popping up: Don Stroud facing down his doom with prickly unawareness, a befuddled Tom Wopat, Bruce Dern, James Remar, Franco Nero – in Tarantino's obligatory nod to the original Django westerns.

From the second he turns to greet us, DiCaprio's Candie is clearly no member of the laboring class. He's a cover-boy dandy for the Esquire of the antebellum South, with his ridiculous Holly Golightly cigarette holder, his pointy cartoon-devil goatee and his air of bored hedonism that can't help but hold a mirror up to the thoroughly average countenance of whoever has the audacity not to have been born a wickedly clever son of the landowning class. Like the insane dreamworld that surrounds him, he's a study in contrasts: he's our gracious host for a banquet on the elevator to hell, balls-deep in chained chocolate as he preaches phrenology and offhandedly instructs a pair of bloodied mandingos to "keep fightin', niggers" while tossing his Southern hospitality around the room like bits of bread thrown to starving pickaninnies. That's no goof on nineteenth-century hygiene when his smile flashes rotting yellow teeth: that's the state of his soul, the silk hanky of the "suh-thun way-a lahf" peeled back to reveal a lump of maggot-infested horse meat.

Candie and Stephen, his head servant and the father figure that's shaped Calvin from childhood, are a crackling minstrel-show duo of his 'n hers interdependence. (Call it Jack Benny and an uppity-as-hell Rochester as sketched by the writers of Blazing Saddles.) Hilariously, Jackson's made up to look like a refugee from a crude Reconstruction-era staging of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He distances himself from the self-loathing of this doddering old sellout with that theatrical old-man look and with funky little touches like the tuft of white hair that adorns his bald geezer's dome. It's another of Tarantino's knowing black men schooling greenhorn white boys in the ways of the world (think Mr. Orange and Holdaway in Reservoir Dogs); yet another Sam Jackson performance that hones Tarantino's genius for triggering manic, queasy laughs to a diamond-bullet sharpness. From his every utterance of "muthafucka" to his Ordell Robbie huckster's laugh (more distancing techniques), to the glorious intro shot of that beady-eyed scowl that breaks over the landscape of his face like sudden nightfall, I couldn't get enough of him.

It's Stephen who runs the show at Candie Land – the original Head Nigga In Charge – and, though he gives great shuck 'n jive while yes'm-ing and mm-hmm'ing away at the side of his boy king, he's the dragon standing between Django and his sainted princess. He drops his mask of servility twice, and indelibly: face to face with Django and, earlier, as he hips Calvin to the ruse that had a house full of fool white folks nodding along like Simple Simons. It's his truest self: the contempt for his socially appointed betters that lurks shark-like under placid waters of sass-tongued coonery. Forget Clarence Thomas, Jackson gives us Stephen as a great-great-grandfather to the flared-nostril surliness that white liberals now applaud as Authentic Negro Expression – commodified black rage turned self-applied blackface. And tiny victories are all Stephen's world allows him; if he has to topple another black man just to feel the salve of backroom superiority against his own chapped ankles, then so be it.

Tarantino, divorced as he is from the fat, humorless bitch of highbrow critical consensus, has long championed Richard Fleischer's Mandingo for its big-studio wading into murky exploitation waters. But Mandingo – along with Lars von Trier’s overlooked Manderlay – trumps Django for pure daring. Fleischer and von Trier dig beneath evil-whitey caricatures to stare head-on at the fetishizing of black otherness that kept slavery on life support. That "otherness" eventually curdled into America's fear of miscegenation: for generations of self-styled white Siegfrieds, the black penis became the fire-breathing dragon forever coiled in wait outside the castle of white womanhood. That’s something Tarantino shies away from, cranking up gunshot geysers of tomato sauce in its place – Sam Peckinpah by way of Chuck Jones. It's not surprising, given his career-long aversion to the sexuality that informed much of the cinema he claims as inspiration. Django does bear the scent of sex in one regard, though, and it's the fruit of Tarantino's apparent white-liberal cuckold fantasies: he sits back and watches a black man fuck the legacy of his ancestors. And you know what they say about black virility. No wonder this long-winded film keeps climaxing over and over.

©2013 Scott Is NOT A Professional Film Critic

On Blaxploitation: The Mack (1973), Willie Dynamite (1974)

The first time I realized that I've got a reasonably hip neighbor in my building? I'd say it was the time I walked past a window and caught a snatch of James Brown's "I was born in New York City on a Monday/Seems I was out shinin' shoes by Tuesday noon," from his eternally awesome soundtrack to the Fred Williamson vehicle Black Caesar. (Tragically, said neighbor turned out to be a guy rather than the cute, ironic B-movie-watching hipster slut he should have been.) Even better was the time I tried dozing off on the red line after a hard day of shuffling papers, only to find my eardrums confronted with some Deebo-from-Friday lookalike and his fucking Radio Raheem-box blasting "Brother's Gonna Work It Out" from The Mack — a moment both Negroliciously obnoxious and hey-wait-can-you-turn-that-up-a-bit? sublime.

And why would broadcasting these particular songs across five counties qualify one for reasonable hipness? Because a) it's fucking Willie Hutch and fucking "Godfather of Soul"-era James Brown and b) it's an ostensible raised fist and "As-Salaam-Alaikum" in salute to that gloriously tacky cultural artifact known as blaxploitation — the most mesmerizing accidental window onto a subculture that '70s Hollywood produced.

How best to convey the low-rent charms of blaxploitation to the uninitiated? Suffice it to say, it's the cinematic equivalent to a circa-'73 Harlem rent party where they're spinning scratchy copies of early Funkadelic and There's a Riot Goin' On and The World Is a Ghetto and Rasputin's Stash and Hustlers' Convention and Miles Davis' On the Corner all night, and you find yourself stoned and sinking ever deeper into someone's faux-leopardskin couch under a huge black velvet painting of Huey Newton or a raised fist, while junkies are nodding off on the side, and the corner preacher's giving a sermon on cleaning up the community, and black beret-wearing cats are mumbling to pimp-suited cats about gettin' their thang together, and Angela Davis-fro'ed mamas are runnin' it down on jive-ass suckas over by the turntable. And in the midst of all the ebonics and kinky 'dos and curious fashions and seething resentment that tend to come out when a particular class of black folks isn't under the microscope of a white America looking for kicks and model minorities, you're thinking to yourself: "Got-dayum, all that fried chicken with collard greens they got up in the kitchen smell good than a muuh-fugga."


Even at its flat-out worst — and this is a genre that gave us Blacula, Dolemite and seven-foot tall Negroes unleashing kung fu on a phalanx of corrupt cops — blaxploitation stands as a time capsule no Tarantinos or Robert Rodriguezes could ever reproduce, as grits-'n-greens authentic as an un-bleeped man-on-the-street interview with the specter of ghetto rage, as revealing an X-ray of black psyches during a troubling snatch of our American history as Miles Davis' autobiography or a Reconstruction-era slave narrative. There's a delirious, am-I-really-seeing-this? quality to blaxploitation's acid-trip mash-up of outrage and fuck-whitey insularity and fetishization of black "otherness." Its fumble-fingered approach to filmmaking conventions like focus and well-placed boom mikes combines with an anything-goes batter-ramming of taboos and good sense to put the "what the fuck?" in "what the fuck?" For audiences numbed on the plasticity of trillion-dollar budgets and Burbank back lots, blaxploitation films serve as yellowing Polaroids of a palpable time and place, thanks to a forced cinema verité aesthetic that often meant venturing where even TV news cameras feared to tread — and capturing some of the unvarnished essence of America's urban slums in the process.

It's a child only the Nixon-and-Soul Train '70s could have sired (after a decade-plus of across-the-tracks flirting), what with the era's thoroughly racialized pop culture and an exploitation market newly animated in the wake of R-ratings permissiveness, Deep Throat and pubic hair in Playboy. That the culture quickly abandoned its nappy-headed bastard to die on a '70s trash heap filled with Pet Rocks, Nehru jackets and "Billy, Don't Be a Hero" 45's — indeed, that the bastard only lived a good five years or so — does nothing to negate the amazing fact of its birth.


Now, whether or not The Black Gestapo or, say, Scream Blacula Scream represented a fully accurate portrayal of Tha Streetz Circa '73 is a discussion I'll leave to people more knowledgeable than myself. But despite what the critics and Spike Lee told you, blaxploitation contributed at least a handful of enduring, visceral classics to the Gritty '70s canon. (No matter how much we still insist on them using a separate drinking fountain from the one that Taxi Driver, The Last Picture Show or McCabe & Mrs. Miller uses.) And films about black folk produced and/or directed largely by well-meaning white guys would rarely — if ever — venture to within an Afro Sheen-smelling distance of the Real McCoy again.

Of course, blaxploitation is a coin whose two sides have to be considered in tandem. Yes, even the gaudiest American International Pictures attempt at taking hoary genre tropes and smearing them with burnt cork could contain moments of startling insight — the kind of self-realization you wish NWA or the Geto Boys would have stumbled upon in the midst of one of their Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song-derived porno-violence fantasias. And yet, for every genuine acknowledgement of socio-economic inequalities, for every queasy racial truth met head-on, you've essentially got a group of films that paint blacks in strict shades of Cadillac red — a cinematic movement that took outré pimps, street-corner hustlers and junkies passed out in rat-infested tenements, and crowned them the ghetto ambassadors to mainstream America.


Was blaxploitation Hollywood's gleeful perversion of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback and its stab at revolution on celluloid? Was it all just a cynical cash-in on black power and the post-civil rights urge of blacks to have their "own thang," which refused to dilute itself or take a Sidney Poitier power sander to its genitalia for the sake of white approval? Was it a "separate but equal" section of the genre landscape cordoned off for black audiences no longer satisfied with a Steve McQueen or a Clint Eastwood to cheer on?

Ask middle-class blacks old enough to have caught these films in theaters and you'll find the oeuvre of, say, Rudy Ray Moore to be the scourge of the upwardly mobile — little more than a compendium of nigger jokes paraded like fine furs for the "oohs" and "aahs" of snickering whites and "Niggroes" too ignorant to know better. They'll tell you that all these films added up to was the illusion of progress, merely the transfer of black America from the old prison of stereotypes to a new one — but since this new prison had velvet-lined bars, Thunderbird on ice and some Jet pinup girls on the walls, black folks made themselves right at home. What the blaxploitation culture locked up at the outset of the '70s, they'll tell you, was a Bobby Seale, an Eldridge Cleaver — forty years in the can, and yesterday's Black Panther has mutated into today's Snoop D-O-Double-G's and 50 Cents, all proud lifers on the plantation of the mind.

Here's the irony, though: blaxploitation films were quite well-attended by black audiences in their heyday. I'd hazard a guess that your average leisure-suited Afro-American of the Nixon-to-Ford era was well aware of the genre's spotlight on only the most sensationalistic members of the community (however authentically rendered), well aware that the success of the genre threatened to weld an iron jigaboo mask to the collective face of Black America. But that's how great the need for onscreen black heroes was — after decades of blackface and bug-eyed coonin' and shuffle-footed Uncle Tommin' and yassuh-nossuh, lawdy boss I's-a sho' 'nuff gittin' yo' dinna ready from a Hollywood cotton field stacked to its peachtrees with fat mammies and buffoonish servants or — later — safe, inoffensive Negroes reduced to scenic wallpaper in the great never-ending commercial for White American normalcy. (A question, when one considers the generally Semitic lineage of the old-school studio moguls who greenlit all this stuff: are Stepin Fetchit or Sleep 'N Eat or the Mantan Moreland manservant roles somehow better than, say, the hook-nosed caricatures in Nazi propaganda films?)


So blaxploitation came along and decided to combat all those nefarious, emasculating stereotypes with... well, stereotypes. Except, in this case, the stereotypes employed were the "good kind," i.e. the kind that make little white penises shrivel in spasms of envy, the kind that no black man would ever challenge. Thus, Shaft and Super Fly played up the black man's street cunning and lion-of-the-jungle sexual prowess that no woman could resist. Sundry Jim Brown and Fred Williamson action vehicles played up the black man's peerless masculinity — and lion-of-the-jungle sexual prowess that no woman could resist.

Symbolism much?

A kid in the Man's candy store...

Later, Coffy and Foxy Brown would tailor the formula to accommodate Pam Grier's tits and charisma but — obviously — black women aren't the perceived threat to the sanctity of white society (and white vaginas) that black men are. Grier's films fulfilled a comparatively safer, much less anarchic brand of fantasy. For white males seeking atonement by flogging themselves with the anaconda-like man-meat of the day's black action studs, the difference between Foxy Brown and watching John Shaft bed every color of the rainbow is like the difference between jerking to "ebony maids" clips on Porntube and gritting one's teeth in muted awe as Lexington Steele drills tunnels in fresh-faced Iowa runaways who resemble your sister.

And then, there's the blaxploitation subgenre known as the Pimp Film. "Look at Tyrone, unparalleled in his ability to bust a smooth rap on the ladies," crowed these chronicles of the World's Oldest Profession. "Watch how the sheer power of his total mental seduction can instantly bring out the natural whore in any woman — especially a white one — and have her doing the ever-lovin' hell out of thangs Daddy never thought possible." And a sea of Afros nodded a collective "right onnnn," bathed in the flickering images of woman-hate wrapped in threads loud enough to suggest a Liberace Appreciation Society in the heart of America's ghettos.

The Mack (1973, dir. Michael Campus) — saluted with an impromptu Leonard Maltin blurb in the middle of True Romance, as prayed to in the church of hip-hop as De Palma's Scarface — stands as the quintessential pimp film, perhaps the jewel of the funky, nap-encrusted blaxploitation crown. Max Julien's Goldie floats like a saturnine king through the streets of post-riots Oakland — his turf, his territory, the place where his corral of hussies on the make seduces its way into the pockets of one dumb cluck after the next. His fellow hustlers flaunt their existence to a world that's shut off all ports to traditional means of recognition, and they do it in everything from craps games to shoeshines, barking loud enough to keep up the neighborhood. Goldie, though, is a sleepy-eyed wolf — easing his way into a room, taking the full measure of a scene before he's uttered a word. You never see him coming. He's as affectless when vowing, fresh out of prison, to become the baddest pussy peddler the ghetto's ever seen as he is when setting out on a bus for parts unknown, with his empire in tatters and the stench of a few corpses nipping at his heels. In between, we get a sort of greatest-hits skimming-over of just what it takes to earn a Player of the Year trophy.

And what it takes is purring with sugar on your tongue as you gaze at a naïve rich girl like an only girlfriend on Valentine's Day and ask her if she's ready to go straight to the top. It takes becoming a psychiatrist and a hypnotist all in one — digging into a woman's subconscious to pull out her childhood dream of opulence and security, then holding it out to her as if it were a glass slipper you'd been carrying in your back pocket all this time. It takes tapping into every women's masochistic daddy complex with a very clear, very firm sense of direction: you're under my protection, my tutelage — you're mine. And in return, you'll do as I ask or I'll leave you where I found you. It means testing a woman to see how much of what she's telling you is lies — is she willing to steal for you, work herself to a nub for you, do anything for you? Can she be taught, trained, molded? Is her love for real? It means peering into their starry little eyes and telling them every lie they've wanted to hear most.


So far, he's no different — in spirit — from any man who takes that roll of the dice and sets his heart and his sanity down on the blackjack table of male-female relations. Only Goldie, like all dedicated pimps, has no heart — at least, none he's willing to gamble with. When his women make the mistake of thinking that they're friends and they come blubbering up to his car with a sucker's tale about how some crazed john made off with all their money, Goldie's jaw sets, his eyes go hard and black like a shark's and he gives them the only sympathy they're going to get from him: "Get back out there and get me my money." When one of his stable flouts the established rules of ho' conduct, he resigns himself to what he has to do — "put a foot to that ass" — even if there is the whisper of reluctance in his voice. (The closest we see him come to "checkin' a bitch" adds up to little more than him grabbing one by the arms and telling her to cool out: glimmer of Goldie's humanity or crafty narrative elision?)

It's in spite of Goldie's reluctance that he's the pimp he is: learning to put one's soul on ice, to see the world in dollar signs, to put that Almighty Dollar Bill above life itself — that's a constant vow one makes, and it's renewed with every glance at oneself in the mirror, every decision, every day spent in "the game." That's a potential future you've shut a coffin lid on, a relinquishing of the better, undoubtedly poorer person you could have been — a hell of a cost to pay for a taste of the good life. And those who pay the highest costs make damn sure they get the merchandise. That code of the street takes precedence over all emotions, all moral concerns, whatever vestiges of your smothered-but-still-breathing humanity you've got moaning muffled pleas from the trunk of your tricked-out El Dorado. It's the semblance of jungle law that keeps the animals in their places, keeps the hounds of impending chaos from snapping forward at any moment. Allow it to be chipped away — just the tiniest bit — and everyone gets devoured. And you're back to those cold cuts and that filth.


Little wonder, then, that the pimp morphed into such a ghetto folk hero, the patron saint of men at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder where the only thing that trickles down is shit. Especially at the time of blaxploitation's flowering, black men in toto lacked both the education and the employment opportunities of their white counterparts — two things that absolutely determine one's financial standing. What better fantasy for a man emasculated by his inability to satiate women's materialism than Goldie or Willie D — niggas so cool, they got bitches bringing them money? What better fantasy for a man unable to ply women with the cars and furs and baubles that other guys use to score the kind of pussy he can only dream about? What better psychic revenge for someone unable to assert his manhood in a culture that idolizes prosperity — a culture where real men aren't measured in inches, they're measured in net worth?

Willie Dynamite (1974, dir. Gilbert Moses) takes the expected crime-is-just-the-dark-side-of-American-business logic — a justification used by everyone from mafiosi to Lil' Pee Wee slangin' rocks down on the "ave" — and proceeds to bitch-slap us with it until we're seeing stars and stripes. We get a sequence of Willie's seasoned thoroughbreds reeling in horny old goats at a Shriners' convention: "The price of meat has gone up," his tallest pinch of brown sugar announces, while a financial analyst on the TV chirps about boom years for the business sector. We get Martha Reeves and her theme song — "Some say his business is cold and a crime" — with its churchy ebullience over percolating horns leaving little doubt as to where our former Vandella stands on the matter. We watch Willie's newest girl Pashen (that's "Passion" to you L7's) as Willie (Roscoe Orman, the future Gordon on Sesame Street, no less) convinces her that she's little more than an affordable, mass-produced hunk of metal and rubber — an easy ride, right? — because, just like the assembly lines of GM, Ford or Chrysler, "Willie's comin' through."

Willie attends a counsel of his fellow hustlers at the behest of Bell (Roger Robinson), an eccentric near-diva of a mack given to intense pronunciations of words like "tight" and "vision," a guy for whom the term "flamboyance" is like an old pair of swim trunks you've outgrown: it barely covers the basics. Naturally, the counsel exists as a sort of board meeting for black-market executives, with primo blow and fur-lined velvet in lieu of coffee and Brooks Brothers suits. (The scene itself is a veritable Sistine Chapel of B-movie outrageousness.) Bell wants all the pimps in "the Organization" to agree to a slicing of the pie: each hustler gets his own designated area to work, as opposed to squabbling over territory and the resultant saturation of some markets while others go underserved. Willie bristles at the idea that lesser talents might be allotted a piece of the swanky hotel turf that he's cultivated for his girls; he bristles at the thought of limiting his potential, of padding his pockets on a curve so that the marginally gifted might catch up to the top one percent. He likes the competition, the Darwinian order of things. "I thought we were all capitalists," our pimp Republican admonishes.


Like The Mack, Willie Dynamite concerns its hero's struggle to keep his Cadillac empire from caving in despite the weight of the various forces bearing down on top of it: Bell, peeved that Willie won't play ball and share the wealth, the obligatory pair of cops who hound Willie from first breath in the morning to last breath at night. Add to that this film's version of the "conscience of the community": Cora (Diana Sands in her final role), a former hooker turned social worker who visits Pashen in the slammer to try to turn her toward the light, and vows to have Willie and his King Tut hats standing on the bread line, with the help of her D.A. boyfriend (blaxploitation and black sitcom fixture Thalmus Rasulala).

Willie Dynamite takes the pimp mythology and strips it of whatever scant political context The Mack tried to drape around it — there's nothing here as shot through with the rage of the hungry as Goldie cutting short a reminiscence of childhood poverty to jump up and confront his own gaunt image in the mirror; nothing as forthright about its own contradictory impulses as the tête-à-tête staged between Goldie and his brother, a Huey Newton-style activist dedicated to cleaning up the neighborhood. ("Nobody's closing me out of my business," Goldie assures him.) For that matter, there's nothing of Willie's square-offs with the po-po that carries the raw frisson of Goldie and his pal Slim (a livewire Richard Pryor) as they face down the barrel of a shotgun and a "run, nigger, run" from the pair of corrupt detectives that's been a tick on Goldie's nuts since before he went to prison. Pryor, in particular, virtually breaks down on camera. The comedian was at the apex of his drug years here — there's a scene with Slim talking to Goldie in a bar early on, where Pryor the actor is so clearly mumbling and fidgeting on a mile-a-minute coke jag, it's like cutting into your neat little genre steak and getting a squirt of blood in your face. The suddenness of it — the reminder of the turmoil behind the finished product — is disquieting.


Willie Dynamite calls a spade a spade, though. "Being rich and black means something" is Goldie's credo to pimp by; the sweet soul tune he hums loud enough to drown out any objections while remaining all coolly exhaled chronic smoke, the proto-Snoop Dogg too laid back in the cut, too pimped-out, too West Coast to seemingly raise much of a fuss about anything. And yet, when it's down to the wire, he's a street fightin' man through and through, hurling middle-finger Molotovs at the rotted-out godhead of entrenched white authority, ultimately aligning himself with his brother's personal up-with-the-people anarchy. Willie, though, represents nothing so noble as the fattening of his own pockets — the film might as well have pulled a Patton and backdropped his "assembly line" speech with a giant fur-rimmed American flag. (And talk about a forward-thinking businessman: Willie's even got an Asian in his stable. Say what you want, but any guy who can anticipate trends at least twenty years ahead of the curve is a guy who's definitely on top of his shit.)

Where Goldie has to take that hint from an underling as to how to deal with ho' transgressions, Willie displays zero compunction about threatening Cora or giving Pashen a taste of the hand for inconveniencing him with her arrest. The cops hounding him aren't corrupt racists — or no more than was the norm for the '70s NYPD — they're a salt-and-pepper duo of Dudley Do-Rights: "good Catholic" Celli and upright Black Muslim Pointer. Pointer, in particular, makes it his mission to take Willie down — by any means necessary, natch — and, forget the law, he's got the force of the whole post-civil rights black-consciousness juggernaut behind him. ("Yeah, she's my sister," he tells Willie about a former Dynamite girl who wound up with a ticket on the O.D. Express. "She's your sister, too.")


Willie Dynamite's got a dimple in its grin, as well; a sly way with an over-the-shoulder wink where The Mack can only go all po-faced and post-high comedown on us whenever it's not lauding Goldie's scaling of the shitheap with Willie Hutch's funk symphony or typifying blaxploitation's carrying of the chitlin-circuit torch with coarse, easy comedy. (Bourgeois respectability versus "keepin' it real.") There's a running gag about Willie's pimpmobile constantly being towed away; what keeps you smiling is — naturally — the thought of a guy dressed like Willie having to share cabs or take public transportation with us regular schlubs. It's the dressing-down of a character for whom appearance is a declaration of identity; the same impulse that made Jules and Vincent going from black suits to volleyball wear so amusing in Pulp Fiction. Willie gets hauled in on a bullshit suspicion-of-armed-robbery charge and — his priorities being what they are — he launches into a flight of pique over a roomful of doughy precinct cops having the audacity not to recognize his coat as thousand-dollar lambskin. (He's like the old lady harrumphing "Well, I never!" in a Don Rickles bit.)

Cora accosts Willie's harem while he's away; she punctures their pathetic illusions about the true worth of the cheapjack wigs and dresses he keeps them in before broaching the idea of them starting their own union. It's a bitch-please reality check sandwiched with sisters-are-doin'-it-for-themslves fist-pumping that kicks out the high horse from underneath the girls only to catch them as they fall; the same earth-mama, food-for-the-soul psychology trip Sands laid on privileged white boy Beau Bridges in Hal Ashby's excellent (and criminally underseen) The Landlord. I always get a kick out of Willie threatening to report his corrupt attorney to the Bar Association or his deadpanning to a cop who wonders how a pimp knows so much about the ins and outs of the law: "I just watch Ironside."


Interestingly, Willie's pimp counsel scene, or the much-parodied Player's Ball sequence in The Mack, lay bare the extent to which the bad-ass black-buck flesh merchants of the American gutter prided themselves on their adoption of female vanity and behavioral tics. (Of course, we're talking about a culture of men raised by mothers, aunts and grandmothers; men who've had to cobble together an idol of manhood in the absence of actual fathers and viable male role models.) With their penchant for furs and jewelry and meticulously maintained perms, indeed, with their inability to go more than five steps into a cock-of-the-walk without checking to make sure their hair isn't out of place — to say nothing of the insta-violence sparked by hairline affronts to the wrong man's ego — it's high comedy that the pimp has left such a chokehold on the black male imagination.

We get scenes of our heroes dismissing challenges to their domain — Willie by waving the little palm cannon he keeps strapped next to his balls, Goldie by city dumpster, sack filled with live rats, hot dose of battery acid or a good old stick of dynamite where the barbecue ought to go. But these pimps aren't hardened killers first and foremost (that's what their henchmen are for, after all), they're preening dandies fresh from gossiping down at the corner hair salon — as reliant upon a distaff gift of gab to ward off those who might encroach upon their territory as they are to sweet-talk women into a life of sexual commodification. And while their ladies venture forth into a ruthless urban night to break their backs and bring home that bacon, our Goldies and Willie D's sit back, cleaning their nails and finding new things to complain about. (Rapper Kurupt: "Bitch nigga/You more of a bitch than a bitch")


Between the two of them, I'd give the nod to The Mack. Like the rest of its colored-section ilk, The Mack took shit — utter lack of polish, a shoot-on-the-fly aesthetic dictated by non-existent budget and only a few weeks to capture it all — and turned it into salade de merde. All of ghetto Oakland’s a stage in the film, and all the real-life pimps, card sharks, drug lords and assorted hangers-on who populate the edges of it a rather fascinating bunch of players. Oakland at the time of The Mack was a war zone fraying fast in the tug-of-war between the Black Panthers and lords of the underworld like drug-runner Frank Ward, Jr. and his brothers. Ward's protection made it possible for Campus and his crew to go where they needed for the sake of The Mack's authenticity and the production repaid him in kind: not only does Ward pop up during a scene in a barbershop and later, during the Players' Ball, but his is the first face we see — via posthumous tribute card — before the film proper even begins. (Ward was gunned down not long after filming was completed.)

Courtesy of director Michael Campus' documentary background, what we get is a roach's-eye view of the pool halls and scuzzbag bars and motel-rooms-by-the-hour where card games and the "what's happ'nin'" of everyday jive constantly flinch under the threat of impending violence (as sudden and casual as in a Scorsese film), where portly white men meet with black flesh merchants to sign tacit social covenants at the nexus of a black hooker’s secretion-slicked thighs, where "the underworld" winds up a fairly nebulous term for pimps and drug runners and hustlers who exist so openly, so semi-officially, as to be the mayors by default of whatever block they happen to claim.


Of course, that last point has been latched onto as an example of the film’s supposed critique of the civil rights movement: i.e. y'all bougie niggas done got a few lil' crumbs thrown y'all way and you done made some token-minority inroads into the suburbs and into higher-paying jobs, but you left us in the ghetto behind with cops who look the other way and politicians who don't give a damn and our kids with so few choices, such little hope, it's inevitable they'll end up turning for direction to Ray-Ray the hustler — a success in the only kind of business enterprise that's truly open to them. Campus, though, being the kind of white director who wouldn't dare impose something as gauche as a privileged white morality onto the proceedings, refuses to editorialize or contextualize what his cameras pick up. There's not much why behind the what in The Mack — predictably, like the culture it documents, the film figures it can spout a few bromides about institutional racism and growing up poor, point its fingers at a few corrupt cops, and we'll fill in the rest: "Yes, black men, due to systemic injustice and lack of opportunity, you moved in to take over the one field in American society where you had legendary primacy over all others: the sex game. Had we been in your shoes, we'd have exploited our sisters and ignored the murderous irony of it, as well."

It's a deal with the Hollywood devil: you watch these films and you ignore the implicit endorsement of their protagonists' exploit-others-because-you've-been-exploited-yourself ethos. You gloss over — as these films do — that psychological divide between the reverence that Goldie and Willie show their sainted mothers and the ice-veined capitalism they reserve for the rest of the female gender. You overlook the fact that two of Willie's girls get sliced up by rival strumpets and the emphasis isn't on them, it's on the pangs of long-buried (or newly discovered?) conscience in Willie. You forgive the way that The Mack spends all of its narrative capital on Goldie's attempts to Get Out The Game and leaves not a penny for the toll taken on the women actually going out and selling — nay, renting — their bodies. (Or, to paraphrase Jon Stewart after Three Six Mafia performed "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" at the Oscars: if it's hard out here for a pimp, shit, imagine how his hoes feel.)


The look of The Mack suits the story, suits the genre — during some sequences, it looks as if the film were decaying as it passed through the camera. It lends the film instant relic status, and that's absolutely as it should be. I don't want The Mack all spruced up and de-artifacted and brought into the present day, slapped down on a nice scratch-proof Blu-Ray for people to watch on their flat screens and impress their Aunt Martha with. I want to see the age of it, that funky dashiki-pattern '70s datedness. I want the proof of that particular print having rotted and molded away in some poorly ventilated attic over an auto garage or a rib shack in the middle of the Bronx (or wherever else the studio keeps the "second-rate" titles like this one).

Give me specks of dirt, give me faded color with that yellowish tinge, give me mono sound with no life or fidelity, take the film print out somewhere and run it between the thighs of the first spazzed-out crack-whore teen runaway you can hire for ten minutes' worth of alley work. Let me see matted coils of greasy pubic hair lapping at the edges of the frame as the film clatters and pops and threatens to come apart right there in the projector. Let today's would-be macks with no sense of historical irony see: this is a Dead Sea Scroll, a fossil from an ancient civilization.

©2012 Scott Is NOT A Professional Film Critic

On Pinky Violence & Japanese Sexploitation: Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl (Konketsuji Rika) (1972)

directed by Kô Nakahira

starring Rika Aoki, Kazuko Nagamoto,
Masami Souda, Michi Nono

Make a drinking game out of the horrors that teen bad-girl Rica endures at the hands of men in this film, and you'll wind up dead from alcohol poisoning by the thirty-minute mark. Studio logo fades then — bam — she's spawned from the rape of her Japanese mother by an American G.I., she's walking in on her kept-woman mommy doing the work that puts ramen on the table (and groaning for "more!"), she's having her own teenage virginity raped away by the same lecherous pig she caught pounding Mommy, she's being accosted in a bar by some (no doubt) rape-eyed lust monkey and shish-ka-bobbing his hand in response. It's enough to make you hack off your own penis and donate it to some poor kid in a third-world leper colony.

To hear '70s exploitation films tell it, though, we men had quite a bit to be ashamed of. Over in the 'hood, we hooked Pam Grier's little sister on smack, then told Pam to get down and crawl like the black trash that she was before tying her up and leaving her for dead. In Roger Corman's Philippines, we kept the fairer sex chained up in our stinking, rat-infested jungle prisons, forced them into back-breaking labor under the merciless heat of the sun, tortured them when they wouldn't obey and then watched, smirking, as they turned their frustrations on each other in vicious catfights to the death. We stalked beautiful lady writers all alone at their country cabins. We turned porcelain-skinned waifs into deaf-mutes prowling the streets of New York in nun's habits. We kidnapped a concert-bound hippie, violated her, then snuffed her out like a solitary bar match before staying the night at her parents' house — and worst of all, we hee-hawed our way through a badly shot Ingmar Bergman reenactment to do it.

As a gender reflected in the warped mirror of ye olde grindhouse, we didn't just unfurl our big, veiny rape appendages and machine-gun women's guts with our bitter seed; we injected them with our inherent moral savagery, the birthright bequeathed to us by our Injun-slaughtering, slave-owning, land-conquering forefathers. It wasn't enough that we men had to maim and shoot and bomb each other, from the rice paddies of the 'Nam to the revisionist plains of Peckinpah's Old West. We had to bring the violence home to our neighbors' wives and daughters, turning the fair maidens of our own cozy American backyard into cinder-eyed vengeance zombies — debauched parodies of man's animal imperative. Oh, that judge-and-jury frontier justice we admire so much coming from the holster of a Clint Eastwood or a Charles Bronson? Let's see how "give 'em hell, Harry" we are when it's coming from a rape victim with some artfully exposed cleavage and a sawed-off aimed at the family jewels.

Of course, Japanese cinema had its own gleefully disreputable take on the heart of disenchantment beating beneath the female breast. Enter "pinky violence" flicks like Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl. Essentially, the genre was an offshoot of the pinku eiga (or "pink films") of the Sixties and the formula was quite simple: softcore nudies mated hard and sloppy with the revenge flick, digested through an old-world patriarchy that viewed deviation from the geisha archetype as titillating heresy, and then splatter-shat onto theater screens in a fevered stab at propping up a moribund Japanese film industry. To summarize the backs of a thousand video boxes: a lone woman, wronged by men, takes up sword and proceeds to slice the offending parties like so much sashimi.

Granted, this is Japan: home of schoolgirl panties in vending machines, tentacle rape hentai and porn videos where drenching a whimpering trollop in a bukkake circle of piss takes decided preference over actual sexual intercourse. So the usual '70s exploitation ingredients — rape, tits at the drop of a hat, rape, vengeance at all costs, abattoir-crude violence, rape, adorably low-grade special effects, rape, the barest of bare-bones character motivation, rape, utter howlers in the dialogue department, rape — get served up omakase in a bewildering kaleidoscope of juxtapositions straight out of Nutsville. (Or, rather: a land where mushroom-cloud fallout forever altered the genetics of basic storytelling.) Call it Kung Fu meets Yakuza meets The Samurai meets Women in Prison meets the teen delinquent film meets an endless parade of easily dispatched henchmen meets badly lip-synched musical routines by adorable Jap nymphs who'll probably have their clothes ripped off in the next scene by grinning baddies with transparently dubbed Dr. Evil laughs. Top the whole Frankensteinian concoction off with a gallon of pinkish goop for stage blood and run through it about a dozen times with a nice, sharp wakizashi. Then, garnish with an extra dollop of rape. Bon appétit.

Accordingly, Rika Aoki stabs, kicks and skulks her way through Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl like the fantasy of every pervy old businessman who's ever paid a prostitute to kick him in the balls or shit on his chest. Aoki's baby fat and baby face tell us she's an honest-to-God teenager here, caged like a go-go-booted tiger within Kô Nakahira's occasionally masterful 'Scope compositions. She's every teenage babysitter a man's wanted to diddle on the couch while the wife's upstairs — a pouty little defiance cocktail with a twist of spite; goth-chick sullen with the beady, distrusting eyes of a street cat that's unused to human contact. Page one of the script might well have read: "Rica, 17. Womanly finesse rising from an evaporating pool of clumsy jailbait insouciance." And nothing — neither Meryl Streepy "thespian instinct" bullshit nor the self-protecting distance that a real actress might have applied — could have better embodied that.


Is Aoki's performance is a particularly good one, then? Well, no. In both appearance and acting skill, she comes off as if the producers had yanked her from the street moments before filming. (Indeed, she was a first-timer who — if the internet is to be believed — fell into a black hole after completing the other two films that make up the Rica trilogy.) It's as if, rather than give her direction, Nakahira simply shouted out each situation from behind the camera, trusting her to pull up the feral rage he needed from her life's experience as a comely lass all too accustomed to velvet-voiced men in suits with their easy promises and talk of "modeling" while they size her up like the day's fish. (Feminists call it the Every Woman Is An Actress Theory.) Perhaps, she was aware of — on some level, peeved by — whatever element of personal exploitation there was in casting her as a beleaguered action heroine who shivers through a blizzard of soul-crushing indignities and spends at least a third of the film flashing wine-hued Amerasian nipplage at all and sundry.


There's a story here, somewhere — something to do with Rica busting up a prostitution ring and saving members of her girl gang who have been kidnapped by yakuza planning to ship them off to service American G.I.'s in Vietnam. Per its threadbare genesis and fast-food intentions, though, that's merely the clothesline Nakahira uses to hang one camp-yet-exemplary pulp setpiece after the next; outsized moments of cartoon bad-assery, every one of them. One doesn't take the mechanics of an expertly sketched plot away from this film, what one puts on instant mental recall is Rica strutting into the lair of a fearsome yakuza to drop at his feet the stillborn baby that resulted from him raping her friend. Or Rica clawing said yakuza like a rabies-infested alley cat during the resulting brawl. Or Rica bedding the yakuza-employed pickpocket who's been sent to kill her for having witnessed the theft of some secret documents, only to hack off his forearm and toss it at his stunned superior seconds later. Or Rica blowing up your stilted wedding with a basket of firecrackers, then riding off on a motorbike with her own theme music on the radio. Or Rica simply being Rica, knockin' Japan out with those American thighs. ("You have a big butt," the only good man in the entire movie tells her.)

Rica bounces in and out of the girls' reformatory, always finding time to roll around a dirty floor with her girl-gang nemesis Reiko. When a thrown knife during one of their brawls results in the (hilarious) death of the reformatory's warden, followed by Reiko's escape, Rica sets out to capture her in order to prove her innocence. Somehow along the way, she runs into bad-girl buddy Hanako — like Rica, spawned from the union of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., though the brown shoe polish on Hanako's face tells us her daddy was black. Hanako's trying to run off with her beau Jimmy, a black soldier (this time, an actual black actor) who ditches impending service in Vietnam only to be tracked down and shot in his back by MP's. What all this has to do with Rica's one-woman vigilante mission is beyond me — or rather, I forget. Nakahira throws pure plot at you — one breathless, comically busy development after another — until it ceases to matter. The end result: your brain shuts off, your giggle reflex goes through the roof, you develop a sudden desire to hang out in Little Tokyo and pick up Japanese girls who'll squeal like skewered rats from the slightest bit of penetration.

If a Kubrick or Woody Allen film is that tasteful blonde you marry and have kids with and proudly claim your allegiance to, then Rica and its ilk are the fat Mexican bitch you bang "on the down low," the one who jets over with no questions asked after a last-minute text at 11:30 on a Friday night. Ten minutes through the door, and she's got your eyes rolling back from the kind of expert blowjob that pretty girls just don't give — straight, simple and right down to business. Sure, keep her a secret from your friends, keep her segregated from your "official" movie collection under a pile of Emanuelle DVD's. Just don't deny that the little slut delivers.

©2012 Scott Is NOT A Professional Film Critic

Shampoo (1975)

The Tragedy of a Dildo, in Three Acts

directed by Hal Ashby

starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie,

Goldie Hawn, Jack Warden, Lee Grant


"You think George is a fairy?" 
"Well. I don't know for sure. He's a hairdresser."

Of course, that's the crux of Shampoo's comedy: the Beverly Hills hairdresser who's only the most put-upon pussy magnet in existence — no hunter but a mere fawn too accommodating to bolt from the crosshairs, using a scythe of finely honed flakiness to hack his way through the jungle of outstretched hands pawing at his jeans.

Beatty and co-writer Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Last Detail) lit their Don Juan stogie with a spark from The Country Wife, a Restoration-era romp about a man trusted to be alone with all the wives of the village since he was thought to be impotent. Here, "impotence" is translated as "suspected to be gay because he makes his living in a field dominated by mincing queens." Naturally, that's a nudge-and-a-wink to a mid-'70s public all too familiar with tales of pussyhound Warren Beatty's Tinseltown exploits. Irony-wise, it's the central conceit meant to keep us chuckling with delight as that rascal George flits from Lee Grant's married rich-cunt to shit-for-brains model Goldie Hawn to Grant's bitter Lolita of a daughter (Princess Leia!) and back to old flame Julie Christie, all under the nose of a town too busy smoothing its moustache and checking its toupee in the mirror to notice. 

Shampoo's no wacky bedroom farce from the bell-bottomed-'n-shag-carpeted '70s, though. Beatty, being the politically committed granddaddy-to-today's-Clooneys-and-Penns that he is, was no more interested in providing sitcom yuks than he was in allowing us a glimpse of Julie Christie's tits. He and Towne set the story in 1968, on the eve of Richard Nixon's election to high office — and with a film made six years later, when the evening news was regularly peeling back the jowls of Tricky Dick's White House to show the maggots gnawing on the rancid, mottled corpus underneath, you'd better believe there's Intended Political Allegory in these here hills. Election Day '68, in Shampoo's eyes, was The Shot That Killed the Sixties — less a blast from a bolt-action rifle than the splash of a '67 Olds plummeting off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, the tattered carcass of an era to be laid at the feet of the "Silent Majority" Nixon voters who pumped it full of buckshot — sure — but thrown in the faces of the peaceniks and politicians-for-change who were too busy injecting sexual and emotional hypocrisy into the culture at large to bother stopping the hunters.

If all that sounds like a tall order for a movie about a manwhore who motorbikes around town with a blow dryer holstered on his hip, then rest assured: Shampoo definitely fumbles the delivery. Of ultimately minimal value are the Spiro Agnew cameos during moments of sexual largesse or the blonde chippie in a brightly-colored Nixon-Agnew hat. (Would one have seen such a thing on the streets of Beverly Hills at the height of the "Love Generation"?) Besides, Towne and Beatty shoot easy sympathy for the Buffalo Springfield crowd in the foot with the fact that the sole likeable character happens to be Lester Karp, the Nixon-voting (and almost ritually cuckolded) businessman played by Jack Warden. So forget politics. Just enjoy Beatty himself, the Olivier of playing who-me? innocent like no other actor of his era. His George Roundy is the cad you hate not to love, sweetly dumb in the lingering mist of a childlike naïveté, the bumbling fool (Beatty's forte, as in Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Ishtar, Bulworth), yet somehow still getting away with things nice boys don't even think about.

If I've said nothing about the film's director, Hal Ashby (whose work I tend to love), it's because George Roundy is clearly Beatty's ultimate auteur statement, his most plainly personal character. Beatty essentially co-directed the film, but a viewer with zero knowledge of that, or of his career-long penchant for smacking foreheads with directors over creative control, could glean that fairly easily. Those of us who consider ourselves familiar with the Beatty legend look for a little piece of it in all of his performances. Beatty is — was — a star, first and foremost. We wouldn't want him to disappear behind peculiar accents or the mustache of a railroad baron from 1896 anymore than he'd be able to. We want to sit back and grin during a scene with him and Julie Christie, as we wonder if a lovers' quarrel in his trailer that morning led her to tear into him with a bit more intensity than the script called for. All the characters he's chosen to inhabit — as well as the ways in which he's chosen to inhabit them — have been either a winking embrace or a chuckling repudiation of his image as The Guy Who's Banged Every Starlet in Hollywood. And Shampoo manages to be both.

Then again, to paraphrase Nixon himself (via Oliver Stone): when you look at George Roundy, you see what you'd like to be; when you look at Lester Karp, you see what you are. And if you're standing in Lester's wingtips, then, of course George is a fairy — that's what people say about guys like him, isn't it? Obscenely self-assured pretty boys with the audacity — the arrogance — to sample the wares of multiple needy, neurotic women rather than chain themselves to a relationship with just one? Men who, by dint of the massive balls they've cultivated, actually live out the fantasies that the socially inept and supremely unconfident jerk themselves to sleep with every night? Men who women seem to just throw it at? And when they do, it's usually right after having their dinners paid for by one of those hommes sans game who poses as the ultimate nice guy — right? — the type who thinks that keeping his car radio tuned to the smooth-R&B station and professing disdain for the Neanderthal ways of the rest of the male species will somehow provide that magical St.-Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus moment for some skank-in-a-bar who's spent the last four years' worth of Friday nights getting her cervix batter-rammed by bad boys who choke and don't call back.

As if devoting one's time and energy to bedding various women — not to mention, all the messy intimacy with female genitalia contained therein — were somehow undeniable proof that what said "player" really craves is another man; never mind that. A guy like George Roundy is too smooth to be straight — please, God, let him be gay! After all, with guys like George on the market, life for the Lester Karps of the world means being stuck in line with a dozen other schlubs cradling ground chuck past its sell-by date — lucky if they get a moment's worth of eye contact from the checkout girl — while George breezes out with all the filet mignon in the place. And half of it probably jumped off the butcher's block and flung itself into his cart — that son-of-a-bitch.

So, George has what the Oprah set would term "commitment issues." Well, as they say, one is often a product of one's environment. And take a look at George's environment: why would he settle down with any of these women, or grant them a sliver more consideration than he gives to the necessity of financial statements when applying for a bank loan? Lee Grant's Felicia is so unblinkingly self-centered in the face of propriety, such a turban-headed savage along the Western shores of dignity, that she fucks George mere minutes after he's dipped his wick in her teenage (underaged?) daughter. Said daughter (Carrie Fisher — absolutely no tape on the breasts here, Mister Lucas) oozes so much slime-green resentment for her that she drags Mommy's plaything into her pen, then blithely tosses it back — still covered in her saliva and teeth-marks. Goldie Hawn's Jill is such a whining, approval-craving ninny — cowering and crying for George at every little bump in the night ("I thought I heard shots!") — that mild-mannered George blatantly compares her to a child during one of those when-are-we-having-kids conversations that every guy dreads. (And even then, she's too dumb to be at least mildly offended.) When their climactic confrontation finally occurs, Jill's been so willfully blind that you're rooting for George to just up and dick-slap her with the truth, ready to jump up and cheer with pumped fist at his infamous "Let's face it... I fucked 'em all" speech, as if it were Elliott taking off on his bike in E.T. 

Even the woman for whom he feels something closest to the L-word — Julie Christie's Jackie — scarcely bothers to hide the fact that she rents her snatch to the highest bidder, that she's with Lester for his money, that she's fully aware of his marriage to "that cunt" Felicia and cares not a whit about diving under the table to blow George — in full view of Lester, in full view of Felicia — during the returns-watching function that serves as the film's centerpiece. In the middle of this crazed, Caligula-esque circus of me, George's "I don't fuck anybody for money, I do it for fun" rings out like the clarion call of sanity — the lone dinghy of true innocence in waters not nearly as pure as professional Sixties idealists would have you believe. It also sounds like the cold, unadorned truth. Say what you will about your local manwhore — at least he fucks for the sheer human pleasure of sliding off another pair of panties grown clammy with the dew of excitement (part of nature's programming, anyway), not for money or social status or career advancement or a good table at Spago's.

"Maybe it means I don't love 'em...

nobody's gonna tell me I don't like 'em very much..."

George is a guy who spends all his time around women — certainly, he must like them, right? Except that, in the real world, the biggest misogynists tend to be those who "score" the most, not (as is commonly assumed) bitter nerds with their dicks indefinitely stationed in Palm Springs. Anyone who's ever spent ten minutes of "conversation" time with your friendly neighborhood suburban jock can attest to this — get him alone, away from the future Playmates he's taken for granted since puberty, and "Love, Tenderness and Respect" ain't the name of the tune he sings. Of course, it might have something to do with the fact that getting a higher degree of "action" entails being around more women. And being around more women entails a greater awareness of the vagaries of the fairer sex — i.e., looming insecurities, the unceasing need for validation, the constant head games, the shallow assessments of what constitutes a good time, the shallow assessments of other people (especially, other women), the tantrum-throwing when she hasn't gotten her way, endless prattling about the most trifling minutiae of her daily existence.

Or, even less charitably: the more success one has getting into women's salty little panties, the more one realizes what great aphrodisiacs things like money and status really are. (How the fuck else could Jabba the Huts like Biggie Smalls or personality-free dorks like Tiger Woods actually get laid?) And once one tends to chance upon this gradual dawning of the consciousness, one tends to note one's increased resentment and overall lack of respect for the pretty little things one gets into bed — even at the height of one's carnal success, even as one fields whispered declarations involving the L-word, even (well, especially) as she hobbles out of your apartment with a dislodged uterus, wearing your fingerprints around her throat like a Girl Scout merit badge. (Or so I've heard.)

Beatty soft-pedals this aspect of womanizing in Shampoo, much as he soft-pedaled Clyde Barrow's alleged bisexuality, much as The Parallax View soft-pedaled the U.S. government's complicity with assassinations and cover-ups, much as Bulworth soft-pedaled the high untenability of the let's-all-be-socialists-and-fuck-'til-we're-all-the-same-shade-of-gray party line. Perhaps that's an outgrowth of some George Roundy-ish need to please (if not outright seduce) every audience member who comes along. Nonetheless, Beatty was nothing if not a guy who knew about women. And, however muted, indelible truths about Being a Guy are indeed carefully nestled behind Shampoo's hedges, waiting patiently for the scavenger hunt to begin.

The Second Most Important Lesson of the film: cater exclusively to a woman's vanity and the pussy's yours. She could have a husband, two boyfriends, a secret admirer and a kid on life support — doesn't matter. Your crotch might bear the scent of half the women in the town, the wall over your bed may sport an entire season's worth of scuff marks from high heels — doesn't matter. Devote every drop of your attention to making her feel like the best-looking woman in five counties, ensure that men slip on their own drool in her wake, that she's the envy of every catty little cunt in Nordstrom's — and most assuredly, the pussy's got your name tattooed on it. Looks have precious little to do with it — tellingly, not one woman in the film comments on George's appearance. If you need her badly enough, if you make her believe beyond any shadow of a doubt that she's the only girl on the planet who can make your back arch and your toes curl and your heart pound — then, you can resemble J.J. from Good Times and you'll still be churning in her gut like bad fish.

Now, for the flip side — The Most Important Lesson of Shampoo: What Goes Up Must Come Down. Every Dog Has His Day. Venture just one day past your sell-by without the sweaty hand of a steady sweetheart clutched in yours, and you're one for the trash heap. A faint memory to bring no more than the occasional reminiscence. Ultimately, the fate of the world's George Roundys is being cast aside for a safe bet, a man who offers the stability of a steady high-end salary to keep her shoe collection healthy and growing. It's being judged for your manwhoriness by the same women who used it to their advantage when it suited their needs — when they drunk-texted you at 11:25 at night for a little impromptu wall-scuffing because they needed the comfort of the ego boost and the orgasms you reliably provided.

Eventually, George will break down to Jackie: "I don't trust anybody but you." And therein lies the tricky part. The part where it all comes back to bite you on the ass. The part where it's initially fun to be the guy they want to fuck, until it's eating a path through your guts: "What if she were my wife? Or my girlfriend, who told me she was just going out for drinks with the girls?" And then, you realize that you can't trust anyone — not the carousel of women with whom you share your living room couch, not the men like a younger version of yourself, whose incessant offers your precious lady love will undoubtedly field the second you're not around.

If George/the '60s is the dumb-blonde innocent that Beatty intended him/it to be, then Shampoo winds up with a pretty dim view of such innocence. The confrontation between George and Lester — player vs. player-hater, young vs. old, The Silent Majority vs. Hippie Commie Out to Destroy Everything We've Worked For — is where George seals his own fate as surely as the film portends the pitter-patter of the Reagan Eighties dancing a two-step to Slick Rick's "Treat Her Like a Prostitute" on his welcome mat. George's utter resentment — "How do I know what they have against you? They're women, aren't they?" — comes spilling out at last. And that ingratiating quality he's used to keep so many balls in the air is precisely what delivers the death blow here: he convinces Lester that Jackie really likes him, that it's not all about the money for her. It's a brazen lie — and it becomes the golden chariot in which Lester dashes off with Jackie into a future George could never realize.

Lester doesn't even need to have George thumped by hired goons. This kid's a flake and nothing more — too non-committal to satisfy even himself, a shiny new toy, a dildo, a ring in the jewelry section at Wal-Mart to be coveted by teenage girls who don't know any better, before they grow up and develop a sense of what their hips and curves and batting eyelashes will net them out there beyond the confines of Daddy's House. At which point, they graduate from Sex as Mere Pleasurable Activity and move into Sex as Business, Pussy as Commodity. The Market. The Adult World. In which George — with his go-nowhere plans and his charming but empty little fantasies — is but a panhandler shivering in the cold, nose pressed to the glass, watching all the fat cats and their trophy wives sipping chardonnay by the fireplace inside.

And then, you're the pathetic forty year-old guy in the bar, the laughingstock with a lukewarm Stella in hand. And then, the Beach Boys is the saddest, most poignant music you've ever heard.

And then, you're alone.

©2010 Scott Is NOT A Professional Film Critic