My Year of Flops (4 page)

Eager to prove him wrong, Bortai indulges in an erotic dance of her own. The untouchable ice princess is revealed to be a carnal creature after all. The sword she flings at him as a crowning gesture is
The Conqueror
's idea of foreplay. Bortai can't resist much longer. She tells his brother, “Tell me of Temujin. I know of him only that on a sudden, my hatred for him could not withstand my love.”

The Conqueror
loses much of its creepy power in its second half, as the train-wreck fascination of dialogue like “Not even the mighty Kasar bends iron forged by Sorgan. There's a secret in the dipping of it” gives way to a bloody, simple-minded, fairly conventional B-Western with Eastern epic trappings.

The Conqueror
's legacy is only partly rooted in the surreal incongruity of John Wayne turning Genghis Khan into a shit-kicking cowboy with ridiculous facial hair and its abhorrent racial/sexual politics. Much of the debacle's infamy stems from Hughes' decision to film the movie downwind from a nuclear testing site, a decision that might have contributed to the cancer deaths of Powell, Wayne, Hayward, and costar Agnes Moorehead.

Hughes reportedly felt so guilty about the film and the death of many of its principals that he paid $12 million for every existing print and didn't allow it to be seen on television until 1974.
The Conqueror
marked the end of Hughes' dalliance with filmmaking; he'd never produce another film (RKO put out
Jet Pilot
in 1957, but it was completed in 1949). The film
was predictably eviscerated by critics and ignored by audiences before being embraced as übercamp by bad-movie aficionados.

It could be argued that God delivered a final punishment to the makers of
The Conqueror
for their transgressions against cinema. But no one deserves to die for making a bad movie, even a film as egregiously awful as
The Conqueror.
Hughes was lucky enough to avoid cancer. Instead, obsessive-compulsive disorder hastened his descent into madness and paranoia. According to show-business legend, he rewatched
The Conqueror
repeatedly during the grim final years of his life, dreaming in the dark about a world waiting to be conquered and a legendary warrior whose savage lust for power, women, and glory must have struck him as terrifying yet familiar.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Upside Down And Starting To Like It That Way Case File #58: The End Of Violence

Originally Posted August 14, 2007

Wim Wenders' 1997 muddle
The End Of Violence
surveys a United States where the government covertly spies on its own people in the name of protecting them. It anticipates a paranoid national climate of free-floating dread, where citizens are willing to sacrifice liberty for security. The attacks of September 11 and the rise of the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act should lend the film an air of uncanny prescience. So why does Wenders' moody meditation on violence feel more like the paranoid ravings of a street-corner lunatic than like a profound act of pop-art prophecy? Probably because while Wenders gets a few crucial things right, he gets nearly everything else hilariously, unbelievably, almost inconceivably wrong—particularly violence, movies, American culture, human psychology, and (oh, dear Lord) gangsta rap. Sometimes it takes foreign eyes to discern great truths about our country
that are invisible to natives, like when Vladimir Nabokov wrote
Lolita
. (I discuss that book and its second film adaptation in a later chapter.) And sometimes it takes a foreigner to craft a portrayal of our culture so bizarrely off base that it borders on bad science fiction.
The End Of Violence
holds a funhouse mirror up to our culture's obsession with violence, and the result is a portrait of God's own USA that's distorted, grotesque, and borderline unrecognizable.

Wenders' film asks what it imagines is a deep, relevant question: How do violence merchants like Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver sleep at night? I'm guessing the answer is, “Soundly, and with high-priced, 19-year-old call girls on either side of them.”

The End Of Violence
centers on gruff, well-compensated Hollywood superproducer Mike Max (Bill Pullman), who decides he needs to be less like Don Simpson and more like Jesus Christ after a pair of sloppy contract killers nearly murder him. In pretentious death-of-the-soul movies like this, there's a direct correlation between spiritual emptiness and technology usage. So it's telling that Mike's high-powered vulgarian is introduced alternately communicating through video conferencing, a headset, a cell phone, and a football-sized mobile phone. If Mike were even slightly more removed from nature, his feelings, and his family, he'd also be manning a CB radio (“Ten-four, good buddy, looks like the missus got herself a killer case a that, whaddyacallit, existential ennui!”).

While manning his interpersonal battle station, Mike gets distressing news from one of his underlings: Someone has dropped a 400-page file in his e-mail! On the Intern-nets! Using various tubes! Shortly thereafter, a pair of goons nearly murder Mike, and he goes on the lam as an anonymous everyman. After surviving his close call with death, he begins behaving like a hard-boiled gumshoe in a Mickey Spillane paperback. While recuperating, Mike rasps, “There's nothing quite like a couple of killers with a shotgun to your head to make you pay attention.” So Mike gives up the Hollywood good life to toil as a humble gardener in a Latino neighborhood. He's like a Hollywood Jesus who came back from the dead solely to finish his work as a carpenter.

Mike continues to dispense bite-sized nuggets of hard-boiled wisdom throughout the film. Here are some other choice selections from my forthcoming book,
All I Really Need To Know I Learned From The Narration In
The End Of Violence: “There are no enemies or strangers. Just a strange world.” “‘Perversely': That's one thing I think I can define now. It's when things are upside down and you start to like them that way.” “The thing about a sudden attack is, you never know where it's coming from.” (Also, it happens suddenly, and involves an attack.) “I guess sometimes your friends are really your enemies. Sometimes your enemies are your friends. Sometimes they're one and the same. Who can you trust? Reminds me of what a prick I was.”

So anyway. The botched Mike assassination is linked to a mysterious FBI program run by sad-eyed ex–NASA man Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne), who spies furtively on the citizens of Los Angeles from countless unseen electronic eyes scattered throughout the city.

Even before Mike's mysterious disappearance, his wife, Page (Andie MacDowell), seems to be suffering a terminal case of art-film ennui, a condition she expresses by lurching about in a depressed, vaguely narcotized haze and babbling spacily about how being married to Mike is like being a sentient rocketship with him at the controls. Page stares vacantly into space, mopes, and cries—first a single perfect tear, then a whole stream of them. This is somehow supposed to be distinguishable from MacDowell's usual performances.
The End Of Violence
affords ample time to contemplate the enigma that is Andie MacDowell's face: perfect, icy, remote, empty.

In
Violence,
people constantly undergo astonishing transformations. Mike impulsively decides that fame, riches, and power are no substitute for poverty and anonymity. Page undergoes a similarly dramatic transformation. In Mike's absence, she morphs from a powerless Ophelia into a cold-blooded, iron-willed Lady Macbeth eager to assume leadership of her missing husband's empire.

But these transformations pale in comparison to the spiritual metamorphosis of the film's most deliciously ridiculous, wonderfully implausible character, a mustachioed gangsta-rap mogul, producer, and
rapper named Six O One played by K. Todd Freeman, a respected theater director and actor woefully ill equipped to play a sneering studio gangsta. Six O One is clearly modeled on Dr. Dre, yet he looks and dresses like a smooth-jazz musician, is clearly pushing 40, employs slang that hasn't been current since they stopped making breakdancing exploitation movies, and says things like, “You know my shit is phat. It's hot, man. You gonna be using it? Or are you going to be losing it?”

After Six receives a prank call urging him to abandon violence in his lyrics, he experiences a profound existential crisis (which seems to be sweeping the greater Los Angeles area) and delivers a patchouli-scented spoken-word piece about how, like, violence is played out and wack, and being peaceful is where it's at.

The End Of Violence
is about the emptiness of popular culture from a filmmaker who apparently hasn't picked up a magazine or listened to the radio in 15 years. As an allegorical, downbeat mood piece, the film has a certain power. As usual with Wenders' films, it features an elegant soundtrack and superb cinematography. Narratively and psychologically, the film is so perversely upside down that I almost began to like it that way. But its singular fusion of arthouse pretension and hard-boiled posturing seems completely removed from the world on which it's supposed to be commenting. “Why do I make films in America? I should have stayed in Europe,” frustrated filmmaker/Wenders surrogate Zoltan Kovacs (Udo Kier) muses late in the film. In spite of Wenders' scattered successes on this side of the pond, that's the one line in
Violence
that rings absolutely true.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Misunderestimated Book-Exclusive Case File: W.

All cinephiles reach a moment in their intellectual development when they realize that Oliver Stone is full of shit. I experienced that
epiphany at 15 while watching
The Doors.
Suddenly everything about Stone and his aesthetic seemed patently ridiculous: the peyote-soaked pseudo-mysticism, the laughable pretension, the stylistic excess, the self-aggrandizing idealization of the '60s counterculture, and the exhausting, empty hedonism. It was as if a Native American spirit guide appeared to me in the bathroom of the Lincoln Village Theater in the form of a majestic eagle and uttered the magical words, “You know this guy's a fucking hack, don't you? Major, major tool. The path to wisdom begins with that understanding.”