RIP John Prine

I heard John Prine's "Hello in There" when I was quite young, not even 25, in fact. A tale about an elderly couple looking back on their life with disappointment, if not flat-out nihilism, "Hello in There" contains one line that my nervous system has hosted for decades: "She sits and stares through the back door screen." "I don't want to end up like that," I told friends and, on the cusp of 50, I've done a good job of avoiding that fate. For one thing, I'll probably never have a back door. For another, I trust I'll be looking at a movie screen to get in one more masterpiece before I die. Film and music keep me passionate, keep me going.

But that's to miss the point of the song entirely. However much we've been touched by grace (or luck), we need to take care of one another, if only to acknowledge someone else's existence:

"So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't careSay, 'hello in there, hello'"

That other-oriented sentiment is not easy to pull off in popular music of any stripe, even country, although the most gut-wrenching chord changes ever recorded certainly help. So much rock, for instance, is about individual transcendence/annihilation. Because I've avoided staring out a back door screen, I like to put "Hello in There" in conversation with the Velvet Underground's "Beginning to See the Light," the coda of which is a radical act of other-orientation as it asks, "How does it feel to be loved?" It feels like heaven, Lou. Thank you.

But before (and to get to?) that point, Reed is euphoric in self-absorption: "There are problems in these times/But, ooh, none of them are mine!" As Ellen Willis noted in her beautiful essay on the band in Stranded, this is just the flipside of Zombie Lou's "I just don't care!" stance in "Heroin":

"Enlightenment has begotten spiritual pride, a sin that like its inverted form, nihilism, cuts the sinner off from the rest of the human race. Especially from those people who, you know, work very hard but never get it right. Finally we are left with yet another version of the spiritual paradox: to experience grace is to be conscious of it; to be conscious of it is to lose it." (83)

And yet we have the music of John Prine. "Hello in There" is touched by grace but never conscious of it. Instead of fading out, it cuts off curtly to emphasize the song's message not the singer delivering it. Indeed, the message is available for anyone to deliver, even David Allen Coe. Prine's oeuvre is a music for and about people who work very hard but never get it right. It's a music that knows no greater sin that cutting oneself off from the rest of the human race. And it's a music with many lessons to teach us during an era of physical distancing meant to save each other's lives.

 

Zalman King, 1941-2012

He never acknowledged it. But given his enormous influence on the development of softcore cinema in the 1980s, Zalman King, who died February 3rd at the hardy-har age of 69, derived more inspiration from starring in Some Call It Loving (1973) than any other project in which he was involved. So arresting was the film’s erotic universe that King’s odd 1960s/1970s acting resume has long seemed an obstacle to his true calling as writer and/or director of such succès de steam as 9 1/2 Weeks (1986), Wild Orchid (1989), and the Red Shoe Diaries franchise (1992-2001). Even today the film mesmerizes those lucky enough to encounter it. Despite its glacial pace, virtually an entire classroom of undergraduate students fell for it in a course I taught just last month. And after well over a decade, Some Call It Loving remains my vote for the greatest film ever made.

What King learned from James B. Harris, the director of Some Call It Loving, wasn’t a taste for aspirational erotica so much as the crazed determination to realize a godforsaken vision. And so after the aforementioned films crowned him the King of Skinemax, he embarked on one of the most unique but neglected filmographies of the last twenty years, beginning with the superior sequel Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue (1991) and reaching an apotheosis with Women of the Night (2001). Critics and viewers dismiss these films as “softcore” although technically, according to David Andrews’ excellent book Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts, that label should be reserved for films ordered by a narrative-(sex) number oscillation. King’s films are something else. And how.

It seems impossible, a miracle even. But Women of the Night damn near matches Some Call It Loving in world-making intensity. A convoluted tale of a blind woman sending out incantatory broadcasts into the wee hours from an 18-wheeler, it weaves together four, maybe five stories in riveting, dream-like logic. Image behaves like sound, wafting through the diegetic playground like radio waves in the ether. Repeated phrases and unaccountable bits of dialogue create a dense thicket of sound that competes with the image track. And the mise-en-scène is absolutely gorgeous. One throwaway three-second shot, a woman alone after a farewell party, contains an absurd amount of visual information. King festoons the set with nets, veils, fronds, creepers, lattices, streamers, gauze…oh wait. That’s Peter Wollen on Anatahan. But seriously, Women of the Night is the equal of any Von Sternberg.

As you take in the crew of beautiful people that the blind heroine has gathered to assist in her baffling endeavor, you soon discover that the film is about its own mad realization. Zalman King had the courage to realize films that would not yield their codes easily. But he also knew that they deserved better than their softcore pigeonhole. As the man himself said: “There’s only a handful of filmmakers – maybe two handfuls – in America who are leading with their chins, and I think you ought to get at least a couple of points for that.”* Well, you get way more than a couple from me, baby!

* Maitland McDonagh, Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, The Bad, and The Deviant Directors. (New York: Citadel, 1995), 68.