Maggie Jaffe's two recent publications, 7th Circle and The Prisons, both won the San Diego Book Award for Poetry. She is presently working on Flic(k)s: Poetic Interrogations of American Cinema. The title is an amalgam of flic, French slang for the police, and for flicks, 1920's American slang for porn movies, so named for the flickering of movie images.
Email address: mjaffe@mail.sdsu.edu

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PSYCHO

I would like to make a movie concerned with food, beginning with its arrival in the city and ending with the sewers and garbage being dumped into the ocean. Thematically, the cycle would show what people do to good things.
-Hitchcock, in an interview with Francois Truffaut

Friday, December 11, 1960, 2:43 pm,
interior shot of a shabby hotel
room in Phoenix, Arizona.
Marion Crane (AKA Janet Leigh) stretched
out in bed, her lunch hardly touched.
The girl eats like a bird.
Above her, John Gavin, and what a hunk,
even if Hitchcock called him "The Stiff."

Leigh stands up. Her D-cup bra like twin atomic
silos, more terrifying than the Cuban Missile
Crisis and world-wide Communist domination.
By the time she changes into a black slip
and bra, we knew she was history.
They used chocolate syrup for her
O God, Mother, blood, blood!

Like most of us, she'd like to buck
the system. Thinking back to her shitty job,
the dough don't stink but it's filthy.
She just sat there while I dumped it out!
Plowing through the rain, even headlights
assault her. The Bates Motel looms up:
the camera pans Norman's boyish
butt: his swish becomes legend, black pools
his eyes, his AIDS-related suicide
in "real time."
Did Hitch hate women?
Only the thin-lipped bourgeoisie,
cops and transvestites, who'd say
straight-faced, a boy's best friend
is his Mother. Here's a fact-
turd for you, America: Psycho
is the first movie to utilize
a toilet as definitive proof of a crime.

After Psycho, nothing was the same.
Not the comfort of showers,
nor mom's down-home
apple pie. Prophetic:
within three years America
will eat her young: the skull
beneath her smirking grin
metastasizing into a diminutive
Cambodia.
 

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SIGN OF THE TIMES

Very few people have heard of Peg Entwistle. There's no entry for her in Ephraim Katz's Film Encyclopedia, yet she left her mark on Hollywood the hard way. Born in Wales in 1908. When her mother died, she moved to New York with her father who was run over by a truck on Park Avenue, leaving her destitute. Married Robert Keith but divorced him when she learned that he had another wife & child. All the same, Peg paid his alimony to keep him out of jail. Tried her luck in L.A. where she roomed with Uncle Harold, who was "good to her." Starred in Thirteen Women with Irene Dunne and Jill Esmond (Lawrence Olivier's wife). But the mystery thriller was so depressing for 1932, RKO fired Entwistle and Thirteen Women was canned. No luck, no money, no men. Despondent, Peg put on Gardenia, her favorite fragrance, climbed the fifty-foot sign behind Uncle Harold's bungalow and jumped from the 13th letter in HOLLYWOODLAND (years later, LAND rotted away and was never restored). Oddly enough, after her death, she received a generous offer from the Beverly Hills Playhouse to be the lead star in their play about a young woman's suicide. According to Griffith Park Ranger John Arbogast, Entwistle still haunts the scene of her demise, especially on foggy nights when there's a strong scent of gardenia, the "happiness" flower, in the air.

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THE SHINING

What are you working on?

The Shining as a Critique of Indian Genocide.

Weird, let's hear it. I'm all ears and nose and scalp and-

Very funny. Well, take the Overlook.

The hotel?

Yeah, aerial shot of the Overlook Hotel. Built on Indian land, which is why it's cursed. The manager even confides to Jack that Apache and Navajo attacked the hotel builders in 1909 for desecrating their ancestors' happy hunting ground.

You mean when Jack goes up there for his interview as caretaker?

Right. It would be more historically accurate, though, if the attack were led by the Cheyenne and Arapaho in retaliation for Sand Creek. But you know Hollywood. One war bonnet's as good as another. The Overlook's a virtual hodge-podge of Zuni, Hopi and Apache art as is.

So what happened at Sand Creek?

In 1864, "Fighting Parson" John Chivington, a Methodist Minister no less, lead his volunteer Militia into battle against the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Wasn't a battle as much as a free-for-all. Lots of women and children's body parts taken as "trophies." It's well-documented in the Congressional Reports: Massacre of Cheyenne, The Chivington Massacre and Sand Creek Massacre. No criminal charges filed for this mini-holocaust. Same old shit. Gold, greed and self-righteous cover-ups.

O, yeah. I read in The New York Times that-

As I was saying, in King's novel young Danny Torrance, who shines, meaning he can read minds, lives with his parents, Wendy and Jack, on Arapaho Street.

Arapaho Street?

Named after the folks slaughtered at Sand Creek.

Do you really think King and Kubrick give a fuck or even know about
Indian genocide?
 
I love it when you talk dirty. Can't really say. King uses horror as a metaphor for America's moral and spiritual bankruptcy-his own father abandoned the family when he was seven. Said he was going to the store for Camels and never returned. That's when King's overbearing mother was left in charge. A signal memory for King is viewing The Creature From the Black Lagoon around the time of his father's disappearance. That's when he experienced the peculiar pleasure in being scared.

And Kubrick?

Who knows what the Master really thinks. He unofficially ended the blacklist when he credited Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter for Spartacus. But Kubrick couldn't stomach the U.S. Spent a number of his artistic years in England, after all. Gotta hand it to the Brits-at least they can parody themselves.

England reminds me: The Shining knocks itself out with fairy tales, but not your Disney version of "Hansel and Gretel." Big Bad Jack even says, "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down," doesn't he?

Yeah, and what about the nod to Peter Pan? Wendy, if you remember, loves Peter, but she's captured by the Indians.

That's true. I read in People Magazine-

After Sand Creek, Chief Black Kettle flies a white flag and an American flag as a conciliatory gesture. Surrender doesn't matter, not when there's gold in the Black Hills. Black Kettle then moves his survivors to the Washita River. There, Custer kicks ass-Black Kettle and his wife were repeatedly shot. Custer was grooming himself for the presidency on Indian corpses. Yeah, Old Hard Ass, Iron Butt, Ringlets.

What?

That's what Custer's men called him.

I'll buy that.

Halloran, head chef of the Overlook, symbolizes a black kettle. Get it, Halloran's the chief chef. Played by Scatman Crothers, who's part Indian and part Black. He's the first to die, axed by crazy Jack. Horror movies play out our fears as well as our unconscious desires.

Come again?

Remember King Kong? Big, Black Buck lusts after all-American girl who's blonde all over. In both flicks, Hollywood neutralizes the Nigger.

Where's The Shining shot? Sand Creek?

No, England, the mother country. Hawk Films Studio. Kubrick as Trickster.
Where was I?

The Shining.

Doesn't The Shining sound like The Cheyenne? Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance signifies The Great White Father. His insanity manifests itself when he enters the Gold Room.

Yeah, the bar. Jack has a drinking problem. Who isn't plagued by fire water?

But the Gold Room's significant, since it's gold that drives whites crazy. White man's burden, Lloyd, white man's burden, Jack says to the ghostly bartender. Jack's itching to axe some thing: the bitch who won't let him finish his sentence and the brat who interrupts his flow.

Who in their right mind could write with all that fussing about?

Scary as shit when Wendy realizes Jack's oeuvre is comprised of a single sentence, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Jack is King's doppelgänger: the writer as sleep-deprived coke addict. Do a line and take the edge off with booze because Jack, the writer, has nothing to say.

Except all work and no play-

Right. His disgust for Wendy, the "sperm bank" who won't let him finish his sentence, and Danny, his issue, signifies whites' destruction of the "virgin" American land and her people. Jacks says, It's his mother. She interferes. What they need's a damn good whacking.

Music by the Beatles as well? Let me ask you this. Why is it your type always lumps black, red and brown men with women?

My type? Shut up for a minute, please. Most of the time, Jack's dressed in blue, symbolic of a Bluecoat. Wendy and Danny wear red for most of the shots. And the hotel walls are ultra-white white, whiter than the bathroom in Psycho. The whole damn movie visually depicts the natural-born violence in Old Gory.

Red is a striking color, remember? Perfect for flicks.

So's your mama's bloomers, Commies and summer sunsets on the technicolor Plains.

What about the mazes, intricate garden labyrinths, weirdly patterned rugs, endless corridors?

A manifestation of Jack's increasing insanity. He's a one-man Donner Party cannibalizing his own nuclear family. Yet Danny can navigate the labyrinth: he's at home in America, while Jack's lost. Danny even knows that Indian tracking trick, I mean walking backwards, to confuse his father-pursuer. Yeah, Danny sees the writing on the wall.

And Jack's icy death?

Think of Big Foot, gut shot, one arm frozen into space, pointing an accusatory finger at our historical amnesia.

Did you say hysterical amnesia?

No, historical amnesia.

You're Jewish, aren't you?

Why do you ask?

Your obsession with genocide. Big Foot? Wasn't he massacred at Wounded Knee?

Now you're talking.

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