Movie: New details in the Bambi case come to light.

The strange, abortive history of the Meyer helmed, Roger Ebert penned Sex Pistols film - Who Killed Bambi? - came in this blog a couple weeks ago. For the curious, Ebert has posted his entire, unfilmed WKB screenplay on the Chicago Sun Times site.

Movies: Bitching and moaning.

There's a story, one of those industry stories that may or may not be true, but it's good and telling, and that's a good as true - better than true - in the business of making dreams, so people keep telling it.

Before the sputtering collapse of the Sex Pistols, punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren was trying to assemble a film project that he'd already titled, with uncharacteristic honesty, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. There was already something of a script and, from the details I've gleaned from the various sources I've run across, it was something of a mess of a film. A phantasmagoric collage of unconnected provocations, it was meant not only to ensure the impresario's status at the UK's most scandalous entrepreneur, but to put his increasingly rebellious help - the Pistols themselves - in their place. For example, the plot would have required John "Rotton" Lydon to play act his way through an incestuous affair with an actress playing his mother, a shot at the fact that Lydon's family bonds were one of the reasons he was never as fully under the sway of McLaren's spell as some of his other bandmates (most notably and regrettably Sid Vicious).

UPDATE: Roger Ebert recently wrote up the full story of the Meyer/McLaren unpartnership, for the details as Ebert remembers them - along with portions of Ebert's unused script for the film - click over to the Chicago Sun Times. If differs from this version is many important respects.

McLaren hoped to rope Russ Meyer, American king of the softcore flick, into shooting this disaster. He flew Meyer and his youthful sidekick and sometime-collaborator Roger Ebert to England. McLaren, in his typically weird simultaneously self-promoting and self-defeating way, sent John Lydon as his representative. Meyer, Ebert, and Lydon met for dinner and Lydon started to trash talk the State's premiere titty flick expert. Meyer, a WWII vet, launched on a classic "if it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking German" diatribe - apparently unaware that a few of the Pistols were infamous for working swastikas into their fashion statements. A physically imposing, near-bullyish sort of man, Meyer actually scared the crap out of Lydon. Lydon backed down and apologized for his behavior.

Later, after the meal, it was revealed that Lydon didn't have enough money for cab fare back home. McLaren had given him just enough to get to the dinner and pay for his meal. Ebert and Meyer questioned Lydon and discovered that McLaren controlled the purse strings, taking essentially everything the Pistols made. And he liked to keep the boys hungry. Lydon hadn't had a good meal in days because McLaren kept him in a state of poverty. Meyer and Ebert got a cab, got Lydon some groceries and some beer, and dropped him off at home.

After that meal, Meyer decided he'd seen enough of the sort of outfit McLaren was running and he went back home.

Meyer was never going to work with McLaren. No doubt McLaren saw Meyer's breast-filled flicks and believed he recognized the work of a fellow soul. McLaren assumed, not without reason, that somebody who makes and exploitation flick is, by definition, an exploiter. McLaren assumed that the Great Rock and Roll Swindle would be a conspiracy of vampires.

But he had drastically misread the nature of Russ Meyer. It's common for film viewers to construct a pathology of filmmakers that's reverse engineered from the final product they've viewed, though this exercise is the equivalent of attempting to diagnose the makers of Rorschach cards on the basis of the images you believe you see within them. What McLaren missed is that Russ Meyer was, essentially, sentimental. At his best, Meyer was a sentimental fool. He believed there was evil and good, that families that didn't love each other were genuinely broken, that betrayal was a sin, and corruption ultimately ate itself from the inside out. His most significant dramatic modes were broad action and comedy, partaking of the lowest common denominator of existence that is also our most essential shared experience, and melodrama, defined by Guy Maddin: "I think that melodrama isn't just life exaggerated, but life uninhibited." It hard to buy this because we often employ a sort of comic book mentality to our assessments of others. We can't believe that there's room enough in one head to believe in good and evil and to be obsessed with giant tits. But, it can happen. Meyer is proof. He earnestly owned his obsessions and his beliefs. In his excesses, he was honest, often embarrassingly and thrillingly so. Perhaps it was a product of Meyer developing his chops as a cameraman in WWII, a residual and unstated bias that what happens on the other side of your lens should matter. If not to everybody, at least to filmmaker.

What Meyer "lacked" that McLaren had was cool detachment. McLaren, despite his importance to punk, did not traffic in excess. He did exactly what he needed to in order to create his desired effect. There's a cold monasticism to McLaren's art that suggests a strategic and outward focus. He's doing everything for the reaction of others. For those with long memories, there's some debate over McLaren's repeated use of the naked photos of the under-aged lead singer of Bow Wow Wow for marketing purposes. (Defenders who cite the artistic allusion to Manet as a dismissal of McLaren's exploitative impulses often ignore that said cover was actually the second nude photo of Lwin that McLaren created to shill his wares, the first being the nude cover of the "I Want Candy" single.) Whatever the ultimate result of the moral calculus on that decision, one can be sure that McLaren wasn't doing it for his own kicks. In McLaren's eyes, Lwin's nubile flesh wasn't an erotic draw. It was a canny investment.

Meyer was one of cinema's last primitives. Uncooth, awkward, vibrant, energetic, forceful, and unironic. For better or worse, he's fully present. In contrast, McLaren approached the medium with the economical and emotional detachment of a junk bond trader.

Rick Jacobson's 2009 Bitch Slap is a fast moving B-flick that shows us what Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! would have looked like if Malcolm McLaren made it.

Books: "Policing gender and punishing girliness."

The American Prospect takes a look at the Twilight backlash and questions its gender politics. From writer Sady Doyle's article:

Twilight is more than a teen dream. It's a massive cultural force. Yet the very girliness that has made it such a success has resulted in its being marginalized and mocked. Of course, you won't find many critics lining up to defend Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, either; mass-market success rarely coincides with literary acclaim. But male escapist fantasies -- which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking -- tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it's about the fact that those fans are young women.

Twilight fans (sometimes known as "Twi-Hards") are derided and dismissed, sometimes even by outlets that capitalize on their support. MTV News crowned "Twilighters" its Woman of the Year in 2008, but referred to them as "shrieking and borderline-stalker female fans." You can count on that word -- shrieking -- to appear in most articles about Twilight readers, from New York magazine's Vulture blog ("Teenage girls shrieking ... before the opening credits even begin") to Time magazine ("Shrieking fangirls [outdoing] hooting fanboys ... in number, ardor, and decibel level") to The Onion's A.V. Club ("Squealing hordes of (mostly) teenage, female fans") to The New York Times ("Squeals! The 'Twilight Saga: New Moon' Teaser Trailer Is Here!"). Yes, Twi-Hards can be loud. But is it really necessary to describe them all by the pitch of their voices? It propagates the stereotype of teen girls as hysterical, empty-headed, and ridiculous.

Self-described geeks and horror fans are especially upset at how the series introduces the conventions of the romance novel -- that most stereotypically feminine, most scorned of literary forms -- into their far more highbrow and culturally relevant monster stories. At the 2009 Comic-Con, Twilight fans were protested and said to be "ruining" the event. Fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, and Harry Potter are seen as dorks at worst, participants in era-defining cultural phenomena at best. Not so for Twilight fans. What sets Twilight apart from Marvel comics? The answer is fairly obvious, and it's not -- as geeks and feminists might hope -- the quality of the books or movies. It's the number of boys in the fan base.

Doyle ends her piece with a look at why feminists should care about the Twilight backlash even if they think the books are a crock. In a neat judo move, she argues that the Twilight phenomenon, considered through a lens other than the heteronormative knee-jerk male panic of most genre critics, might be a watershed moment in considering the role of young women in the marketplace driven public sphere.

Teen girls have the power to shape the market because they don't have financial responsibilities, tend to be passionate about their interests, and share those interests socially. If a girl likes something, she's liable to recommend it to her friends; a shared enthusiasm for Edward, or the Jonas Brothers, or anything else, becomes part of their bond. Marketers prize teenage girls, even as the media scoff at them.

If you want to matter, though, apparently you need boys. The third film adaptation of the Twilight series, Eclipse, will be helmed by horror director David Slade, who has made such movies as Hard Candy and Thirty Days of Night. Even though it will not hit theaters until June 2010, it is already being touted as "darker," more action-packed, and more "guy friendly." Because the popularity of the Twilight formula guarantees Eclipse will be a box-office smash, the decision to consciously appeal to boys seems more like a grab at credibility than at profit. Romance-loving Twi-Hards be damned! Who cares about disappointing a huge, passionate, lucrative fan base if they're all a bunch of girls?

As Twilight demonstrates, not everything girls like is good art -- or, for that matter, good feminism. Still, the Twilight backlash should matter to feminists, even if the series makes them shudder. If we admit that girls are powerful consumers, then we admit that they have the ability to shape the culture. Once we do that, we might actually start listening to them. And I suspect a lot of contemporary girls have more to talk about than Edward Cullen.

Books: Don't you know that it's different for girls?

Shots at the Twilight film, and the YA novel series that spawned it, are now about as common on horror blogs as RSS feeds and follower lists. Not too long ago, I took a jab at the series, despite having never read any of the books or seen the film in question. That's pretty lousy of me, I reckon; though I can take some small measure of comfort in the fact that I'm far from alone. As of this writing, I've seen blogs that make unfavorable apples and oranges comparisons between the tween-oriented franchise and the mediocre soft-core vamp flicks that poured out of 1970s Europe and into the Gen X horror fan's consciousness like some polluting tanker spill of cinematic sludge. Other, perhaps less dubious projects, include efforts to detail crypto-Mormon propaganda hidden in the works and diatribes that suggest the books' sado-masochistic undertones program young women in assuming that abusive relationships are the norm. Capable of being both an anti-sex abstinence tract and perverse ode to violent eroticism, Twilight and its sibling tomes are apparently the critical equivalent of the shmoo: the most useful beast the critical world has ever known.

This is not to say that these criticism aren't all correct. (Well, excepting the one that claims that Twilight is less subversive than the fangs and boobies flicks of the Euro-trash cinema set – the latter being "subversive" only to the degree that selling she-flesh to audiences looking for cheap thrills, a multicentury tradition in Western culture and the key market strategy of the world's oldest profession, can be thought to be subversive. That criticism is just wrong.) Twilight may be all these vile things and more.

But still, it's nice to hear an opposing viewpoint.

Over at the Atlantic, writer Caitlin Flanagan looks at the Twilight books to figure out what they can tell us about, and I quote, "the complexities of female adolescent desire."

From the article:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

About the steamy (not so steamy?) parts, with an interesting note on the important role the supernatural plays in the book's thematic scheme:

The erotic relationship between Bella and Edward is what makes this book—and the series—so riveting to its female readers. There is no question about the exact nature of the physical act that looms over them. Either they will do it or they won’t, and afterward everything will change for Bella, although not for Edward. Nor is the act one that might result in an equal giving and receiving of pleasure. If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about "abstinence," and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people. (Because it takes three and a half very long books before Edward and Bella get it on—during a vampiric frenzy in which she gets beaten to a pulp, and discovers her Total Woman—and because Edward has had so many decades to work on his moves, the books constitute a thousand-page treatise on the art of foreplay.) That the author is a practicing Mormon is a fact every reviewer has mentioned, although none knows what to do with it, and certainly none can relate it to the novel; even the supercreepy "compound" where the boring half of Big Love takes place doesn’t have any vampires. But the attitude toward female sexuality—and toward the role of marriage and childbearing—expressed in these novels is entirely consistent with the teachings of that church. In the course of the four books, Bella will be repeatedly tempted—to have sex outside of marriage, to have an abortion as a young married woman, to abandon the responsibilities of a good and faithful mother—and each time, she makes the "right" decision. The series does not deploy these themes didactically or even moralistically. Clearly Meyer was more concerned with questions of romance and supernatural beings than with instructing young readers how to lead their lives. What is interesting is how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book poses, and by the solutions their heroine chooses.

Connecting the novel's plot to classic gothic romances, notably Jane Eyre, Flanagan suggests that there's something primal about the story, even for today's readers.

The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.

And later:

Think, for a moment, of the huge teen-girl books of the past decade. "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" is about female empowerment as it's currently defined by the kind of jaded, 40-something divorcées who wash ashore at day spas with their grizzled girlfriends and pollute the Quiet Room with their ceaseless cackling about the uselessness of men. They are women who have learned certain of life's lessons the hard way and think it kind to let young girls understand that the sooner they grasp the key to a happy life (which essentially boils down to a distaff version of "Bros before hos"), the better. In "Sisterhood," four close friends might scatter for the summer—encountering everything from ill-advised sex with a soccer coach to the unpleasant discovery that Dad's getting remarried—but the most important thing, the only really important thing, is that the four reunite and that the friendships endure the vicissitudes of boys and romance. Someday, after all, they will be in their 50s, and who will be there for them—really there for them—then? The boy who long ago kissed their bare shoulders, or the raspy-voiced best friend, bleating out hilarious comments about her puckered fanny from the next dressing room over at Eileen Fisher? "Gossip Girl," another marketing sensation, replaces girls' old-fashioned need for male love and tenderness—these chippies could make a crack whore look like Clara Barton—with that for shopping and brand names. Notoriously set in an Upper East Side girls school that seems to combine elements of Nightingale-Bamford with those of a women's correctional facility after lights-out, the book gives us a cast of young girls whose desire for luxury goods (from Kate Spade purses to Ivy League–college admissions) is so nakedly hollow that the displacement of their true needs is pathetic. "Prep"—a real novel, not the result of a sales-team brainstorm—derives much of its pathos from the fact that the main character is never sure whether the boy she loves so much, and has had so many sexual encounters with, might actually constitute that magical, bygone character: her "boyfriend." The effect of "Prep" on teenagers is reminiscent of that of "The Catcher in the Rye": both books describe that most rarefied of social worlds, the East Coast boarding school, and yet young readers of every socioeconomic level have hailed them for revealing the true nature of their inner life. In "Prep," the heroine wants something so fundamental to the emotional needs of girls that I find it almost heartbreaking: she wants to know that the boy she loves, and with whom she has shared her body, loves her and will put no other girl in her place.

Bella, despite all of her courage and competence, manages to end up in scrape after scrape: finding herself in the path of a runaway car, fainting at school, going shopping in a nearby city and getting cornered by a group of malevolent, taunting men. And over and over, out of nowhere, shoving the speeding car out of her way, or lifting her up in his arms, or scaring the bejesus out of the men who would harm her, is Edward. And at last, while she is recuperating from the near-rape, with a plate of ravioli in a café near the alley, he reveals all. Not since Maxim de Winter's shocking revelation—"You thought I loved Rebecca? … I hated her"—has a sweet young heroine received such startling and enrapturing news. As he gradually explains, Edward has been avoiding and scorning Bella not because he loathes her but because he is so carnally attracted to her that he cannot trust himself to be around her for even a moment. The mere scent of her hair is powerful enough that he is in a constant struggle to avoid taking—and thereby destroying—her. This is a vampire novel, so it is a novel about sex, but no writer, from Bram Stoker on, has captured so precisely what sex and longing really mean to a young girl.

Though I found Flanagan's defense of the series – fueled by both literary insight and personal anecdote – very persuasive, I still have some reservations. Being something of a bargain basement empiricist (by which I mean I'm one of those thick-headed yahoos who can't be told), I had to see how the book behaved outside the lab of lit theory.

Taking to heart the idea that this was something only a young girl could really understand, I found the supposed "perfect" reader of Twilight. Ruby is the only daughter of my neighbor's who live a few doors down. She's a voracious reader of novels and comics – she's also a novice on the piano and huge fan of Disney's unstoppable High School Musical franchise. Curiously, she's also a big David Bowie fan, but she's got no particular love for the Beatles – something her heartbroken parents, who feel Bowie is some avatar for a morally deadening post-60's hyperreal vacuity, confided in me.

Ruby has read the book Twilight and she was not impressed. She said it was boring. She enjoyed the action scenes and the scary parts, but she found the author's attention to the physical beauty of the male lead – the vampire lover Edward – tedious and, ultimately, a deal-breaker. She did not read past the first book. She saw the movie, but mostly out of a sense of social obligation: all her friends were going, it would be gauche to avoid it on something as inconsequential as objections over quality. Ruby enjoyed the movie better than the book. She felt that it was vast improvement just showing how pretty Edward was, instead of talking about it over and over.