69 Days of Wonder Woman: Day 44, Medication time

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Click to enlarge, print, and color. Very soothing, color crayons.

Burroughs Month: Madness is.

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“Madness is confusion of levels of fact. … Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.”

(William S. Burroughs.)

Liberated Negative Space: That IS the truth

It never does. That’s why the truth has to be dug to be got to, because we can’t conceive the entirety of it, just pieces at a time, like the first team uncovering the fossil of a tyrannosaur, only when they finally glimpse the whole shape of it, it comes to life and eats them all. Jesus Christ, if we went around with the whole truth in our heads all the time, we’d never stop screaming until someone finally looked the other way and we managed ten seconds of privacy to kill ourselves and end the horrifying senselessness. That’s truth. Not just stranger than fiction — messier and a lot more painful, yes?

Movie Moment: Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman

Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958).

Credit for all these great screencaps is due to meltdownclown on the lj.

Oh, no, it’s a giant lady and is she pissed. I think everyone should see this movie so I will only give you the barest bones of the lowdown and let the caps do the convincing, here. I think I’ll blather about Allison Hayes after a brief plot summary.

Allison Hayes plays Nancy Archer, a wealthy but unhappy wife with a dick of a husband who drives her to drink. All that dandy Harry, played by William Hudson, wants to do is hang out at the bar with his trampy girlfriend named (wait for it) Honey.

Honey is played by the lovely and talented Yvette Vickers, who we will see much more of, well, ALL of, later this month in her Girls of Summer appearance.

Besides Honey and Harry pissing her family money away on gin and poorly rolled cigarettes in a van down by the river, Nancy has other troubles too, as ladies sometimes do, such as spending time in sanitariums and getting hit with rays from alien orbs that make her huge.

When Nancy sees evidence of aliens landing and insists on her story’s truth, Harry decides it’s the perfect opportunity to get her committed for good, the better to spend her money and bang Honey free of nagging.

Because it’s hard to ask your husband where he’s going or how come a check bounced when you’ve got that clampy-downy-so-you-don’t-bite-off-your-tongue-while-the-jokers-make-an-epileptic-of-you electroshock mouth guard thingy in your mouth. Better living through electricity. Tell a friend.

Honey and Harry, because they are good and god-fearing people, flirt with the idea of just o’d’ing Nance on her sedatives, but it’s too late! The most repressed and angry drunk in town, pretty much the last person you’d ever want to grow into a strong super-giant, has — grown into a strong super-giant!

Oh, shit, you did NOT expect her to come down to the bar and wreck the joint. And even if you thought it was a dim possibility, you probably didn’t picture her 50 feet tall.

Nancy’s well-deserved rampage doesn’t come until nearly the end of the film and is sadly brief at that, but she does manage to kill both Honey and Harry, so that’s a check in the win column.

Allison Hayes (née Mary Jane) was labeled by Life magazine in one of the few other before Fifty Foot Woman pics I found of her as “Miss Washington 1949,” confusing all the way around because she was really Miss District of Columbia and it was as a Miss USA candidate, NOT Miss America. More on Miss USA in a sec.

According to the wiki she was also crowned Miss Dixie in 1951, which pageant has come up before in our Valentine Vixen post on Nancy Jo Hooper. The lovely and talented Sophia Loren lookalike Ms. Hooper was runner-up in the 1962 Miss Dixie pageant. Remember?

To refresh your memory on the super-fair and reasonable rules of the beauty contest, via pageantopolis: “Each contestant was judged on five qualities: intellect (5%), personality (10%), appearance in evening gown (15%), talent (30%), and appearance in swim suit (30%).”

“The judges each picked the girls they rated from first to seventh in each classification of competition. The girl with the highest cumulative point score became Miss Dixie.”

You may sneer at the low rating of intellect on the judging scale and I agree it’s not entirely amiss. But if you are ruffled by the equal weight of “talent” and “appearance in a swimsuit” please remember that the Miss USA pageant continues not to have a “talent” portion at all.

Let’s give credit where credit is due: kudos to the Miss USA organization for not sugar-coating the fact that this is a contest where what really matters is bikinis.* Let’s call a spade a spade and make no bones of this thing — leave your cello at home, honey, because what we want to know about you is how you look in a “formal” dress that would make a pimp blush.

*The Miss USA pageant organization and its sister organization, Miss Universe, provide women with the opportunity to travel, further their education and serve the international community through philanthropy. Charities aligned with the Miss USA organization include the Susan G. Komen for the Cure® Foundation, the USO, and, most importantly to me, Gilda’s Club.

I’m not knocking Miss USA herself nor any titleholders or competitors past or present. They’re hard working good looking gals and that’s great. I’m just saying — a talent portion would make the pageant look better. Also, no more Donald Trump and reality television programs built around it would help.

Ms. Hayes was lifelong close personal friends with the quietly wonderful fag of our fathers Mr. Raymond “Perry Mason” Burr, beginning with the time of filming 1954’s Western film Count Three and Pray. After her own tv and screen careers started petering out, Burr wrangled her 5 separate guest appearances on Perry Mason.

That makes so much sense cause everyone knows that gay guys love beauty pageants, am I right. Hey everybody it’s mildly-hateful generalization day! mildly-hatefully generalize with me! Black guys like purple. Chicks like shoes. Irish people unilaterally drink.

I’m sure you will be shocked, given the care and craft evidenced in these photos, to learn that Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman was made for only around $88,000. The picture was a huge hit and talk of a sequel was shopped about but never materialized.

There was a 1993 remake by Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Spinal Tap) for HBO that was rated a critical failure. I disagree but I am widely known for my devotion to its star, one Miss Daryl Christine Flyass Mothafuckin’ Hannah!!!, so I admit to enormous bias.**

**Flyass Mothafuckin’ is a family name. If she was a boy it would have been her first name, not her middle. Girls in the family are named Daryl and boys are named Flyass Mothafuckin’. Did You Know?***

***This is the opposite of true.

In the 1993 update, the Nancy character is not so much an alcoholic, though she is neurotic and repressed. There is also the addition of a really overbearing father and her husband is bossier with her too. As with the original, when she gets her “day,” you are pumped as shit for her.

I like this type of story. I always liked to see the quiet kid with glasses ignoring his lunchroom tormentors just up and flip the fuck out and go nuts and bloody noses and make rich kids cry. But the truth is, the couple times I’ve seen something similar, and I am this way as well, come to think of it so I’ll switch to “we” on this one — it never quite works out.

We hold-it-all-in types are so out of practice at being expressively furious that we tend to sputter when we try to swear at our oppressors, and somehow we do not entirely break things that we throw at the wall even if we thought we threw it pretty hard.

Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman has been widely satirized and paid homage to, I hope I am convincing you justly.

As a few examples, the image of Nancy in her white dress from the poster pops up on album covers for alternative bands now and again, and on people’s walls in movies a lot. The shot of her next to the power lines (to demonstrate her shocking height!!) has become fairly iconic because it’s a great composition.

In the recent animated film Monsters vs. Aliens, the character of Susan, voiced by Reese Witherspoon, is an obvious parody of Nancy Archer. When Susan first becomes Ginormica, she is exactly fifty feet tall, although she grows slightly larger a few times throughout the film.

Susan/Ginormica’s character backstory is also similar to Nancy’s. She is a sweet, self-sacrificing girl who is put upon by her arrogant, grandstanding fiance, and frequently represses her own feelings in favor of giving his primacy. She does not consider herself strong and generally relies on others to rescue and advise her.

By the end of the film, she has become resolutely strong and self-sufficient, and it’s a very enjoyable transition to watch. I think I might have to give it its own Movie Moment one of these days, because it is also hilarious.

Subject jump. The mind is such an extraordinary thing. My grandmother has been having a terrible Bad Day, and keeps insisting I take her home and that we are in Idaho and not California, and that I am her cousin and not myself and she is sad because she keeps remembering that all of her brothers and sisters are dead and she just wants to see her dogs, and it has basically been a heartbreaking afternoon —- but as I was putting this post together and selecting the pictures for it, she came by and stood behind me (probably to ask me again to take her home, which we are driving to Washington/Idaho next week to do but likely only to clean it up and sell it, I hope to God that does not sink in).

She saw the pictures on the monitor and said immediately, “Oh, Lord, I remember that at the drive-in! That must have played all Summer after it first came out. What’s her name? Hayes, Hayward?”

I said, “You got it. Allison Hayes.”

She laughed and shook her head and said, “Fifty foot woman. My word. I think everyone in Spokane probably saw it three times each.”

Now she is on the phone with my mother patiently explaining that when she comes home from work, could she please just run her home because Priest River is not so far from Spokane and then she could sleep with her dogs tonight.

I hate what’s happening to her. I think I hate it enough to maybe need a book about how to deal with it or a meeting to go to or something.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: You’re here because of the system

But that’s not why you’re here — that’s not why you’re here, man. … You’re here because of the system.

Jeffrey Goines, 12 Monkeys.

Daily Batman: Sound advice from a reliable source

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Sound advice from the sanest, strongest, most consistently mentally healthy man in comics. Jesus-Christ-Bananas, where does Bruce Wayne get off giving other people maxims about monkeyhouse avoidance? He has about as much business handing out advice about healthy minds as that hack Dr. Phil has authoring books on diets.

Honestly. If people’s outsides were their insides, Bruce Wayne would look like Mason Verger from Hannibal.

(spoiler alert: there is a Hannibal Movie Moment in the near-ish future.)

Think about it.

Goethe Month — Daily Batman: Bats in the belfry

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We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.)

Movie Moment: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975).

I wrote quite a while ago about how I had always responded very strongly to this movie, well before reading the book, but I recently rewatched it after having gone through the excruciating experience of being impelled to read the book all of a night in September (thanks to a loan from Jonohs), and it reminded me I’ve been collecting screencaps which I’d like to share.

Actually I have dozens more of these, but I think in this edition I want to keep the focus mainly on the question of Mac’s mental state and the conflict between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched.

“In one week, I can put a bug so far up her ass, she won’t know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch.”

(I’m pretty sure that all of these particular caps are via One Day, One Movie on the tumblr.)

Did You Know? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed on location at the State Mental Hospital in scenic Salem, Oregon. I’m not familiar with that particular monkeyhouse, but Ken Kesey was: he based the 1962 book, from which the movie was adapted, on his experiences working as an orderly there, during which time he participated in a study where he was given, among other hallucinogenic compounds, a friendly little fuckstorm of LSD and peyote. Yummy! Your tax dollars at work!

Nurse Ratched: If Mr. McMurphy doesn’t want to take his medication orally, I’m sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way. But I don’t think that he would like it.

McMurphy: [to Harding] You’d like it, wouldn’t you? Here, give it to me.

“Is that crazy enough for you? You want me to take a shit on the floor?”

“Hey, baby, where you from?” “I am from 1234 Asylum Street, Room 22.”

The original Oregon State Hospital for the Insane was established by J.C. Hawthorne in what was then East Portland, Oregon, (now the Hawthorne District). It was built in 1862, and the street on which it was built was renamed Asylum Street. Local residents protested about the name, however, and it was renamed Hawthorne after the hospital’s founder in 1888.

The street in Salem on which the current hospital is located, Center Street, was also originally named Asylum Avenue.

Heartwarming. I used to live very close to Hawthorne in Portland. Between you and me, the name change was unnecessary. There is just as much a cacophony of poverty, despair, madcap high spirits, compassionately helpless onlookers, and emotionless venture capitalists as the name “Asylum Street” suggests. An intersection of mixed purposes and emotions.

Droppin’ c-bombs. That Mac!

“Now they’re telling me I’m crazy because I don’t sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. If that’s what being crazy is, then I’m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, whacko — no more, no less, that’s it.”

I have basically scene by scene screencaps but I’ve always felt really strongly about this movie and I’m committed to hoping that everyone goes and watches it for themselves. No spoilers today.

The main difference between the [film and the book] is that the novel is narrated by Chief Bromden, and the reader knows straight away that he [no spoilers].

This was a major source of controversy in developing the screenplay, and eventually the reason why the author, Ken Kesey, was not the final writer. He felt as though the narration of a schizophrenic was an important aspect of the novel, because it produced a hallucinogenic perspective where the reader/viewer is not always sure exactly what is true. (the wiki)

That was my only criticism to Jonohs, I believe, when we discussed the differences between the book and its film adaptation, so now I’m feeling pretty unoriginal.

The end.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: It happens, “Pure insanity” edition

The Woodstock Festival. Bethel, NY. August 17, 1969.

This shot of some liberated negative tent space at Woodstock is up by way of foreshadowing today’s Movie Moment.

Daily Batman: Oedipal Impulse like a Bat Out of Hell

Paging Dr. Freud.

Welcome to the monkeyhouse, Dick Grayson.

“Batman & Robin # 10,” by Frank Quitely.

via thisisnthappiness.com

And just as I was about to bring the guitar crashing down upon the center of the bed, my father woke up, screaming, “Stop! Wait a minute! Stop it, boy! What do you think you’re doing? That’s no way to treat an expensive musical instrument.”

And I said, “Goddamn it, Daddy! You know I love you. But you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about rock and roll!”

— Meatloaf, “Wasted Youth,” Bat Out of Hell II.

Daily Batman: The Goddamn Batman.

I think I’ve referred to this title a time or two, but here is the origin of “the goddamn Batman” line.

All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, written by Frank goddamn Miller (Sin fucking City, 3cuntface00, Dareshit-fuck-christ-pissdevil).

Perhaps the book’s single most infamous moment occurred when Miller’s gritty style of dialogue led the title character to introduce himself to Grayson as “the Goddamn Batman.” The phrase went on to become something of a meme among comic book fans for its perceived comedic value,[11] and has, since its sudden fame, been repeated at least once in nearly every subsequent issue of the comic. According to reviewer Brett Weiss, the line “drew derision from fans and critics alike”. (the wiki)

Oh, Frank Miller. I may get mad or sneer at you from time to time, but I swar to gar, things like this make it impossible not to love you. Thanks to that outre bit of forced tough-guy dialogue, a whole new world of wonderful jokes have erupted. I for one am grateful.

Thanks, buddy!

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Welcome to the Monkeyhouse edition

Outer wall, Hudson River State Mental Hospital.

“Bailamos” by ohwhatachristy on flickr. Poughkeepsie, NY.

Daily Batman: It happens

“In each of us there are two natures: good and evil. If this primitive duality of man could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that is unbearable. It is the curse of mankind that these polar twins should be constantly struggling.” — Dr. Henry Jekyll

Welcome to the monkeyhouse, Bruce Wayne. We’ve been waiting.

Daily Batman: They’re coming to take you away

Welcome to the monkeyhouse!

Need a rest? Dr. Jeremiah Arkham has plenty of room for you. It’s no trouble at all.