Ant-Man in Twin Peaks (Trailer)

In the game & comic shop I spend time in, they’ve been discussing a certain new movie trailer at great length. Yet for someone who loiters about in a comic shop all day like a Kevin Smith extra, I’m little interested in the realm of geekdom. I haven’t even watched the trailer for Rise of Skywalker yet, but I feel like I have for all the discussion I’ve overheard. For my time I’d much rather watch the Lewton-Tourneur gem Cat People and speculate on just how queer it is (hint: it is very queer) than pore over a piece of mass marketing frame by frame. I don’t know what the new Star Wars holds, but it can’t be worse than El Camino, so I’ll see it.

Growing up on the brainchild of George Lucas, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to separate the saga from the very idea of what makes good cinema. Then came Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, a brilliant accomplishment whose genius has nonetheless been misinterpreted by seemingly everyone in the film industry (not least of which being Peter Jackson, if his Hobbit films are any indication). The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the bastardization of The Lord of the Rings. One plot arc to rule them all.

But then no one wants to hear me trash Marvel movies (again). If there’s one cardinal sin of 2010’s film criticism, it’s to find nothing of redeeming value in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’m reminded of A.S. Hamrah, who writes, “I don’t feel compelled to tell you that I love Edgar Wright movies to show that sometimes I luxuriate in mediocrity”. Similarly, I won’t go through the motions to try to prove myself worthy of some kind of bullshit cinematic faux-populism. I love good movies and bad movies; the problem is that Marvel movies are neither. The real elitism is the assumption that these gargantuan entities, the perfect cinematic embodiment of U.S. imperialism, must be taken for anything more than what they are. Maybe I’ll care about one when David Lynch, soon to receive an honorary Academy Award (resulting in a wave of puff pieces about how his American vision resonates in the Trump era, or something) directs one. Ant-Man could wind up in Twin Peaks somehow.

Speaking of David Lynch, aka the image on one of the enamel pins that make up my “Pinhead” Halloween costume, the moment in Cat People that jumps out most to me is the quintessentially anti-Lynchian moment where Kent Smith’s Oliver confusedly opines that he’s “just never been unhappy,” which sounds miserable. Whereas one of the prime goals of the Lynchian project is to expose the twisted undercurrents of polite society (which worked perfectly in the Reagan-Bush years, but nowadays one could imagine Donald Trump citing Blue Velvet in his promise to “drain the swamp” the same way Reagan cited Star Wars and Rambo), Oliver speaks something far truer to the experience that gave birth to modern neoconservatism: a bewildered disbelief that an increasingly unequal system has left even them — THEM! straight white males! can you believe it?!— out.

Kent Smith’s character in Cat People, curiously enough, shares a first and last name with the British actor Oliver Reed, who played psychoplasmics pioneer Dr. Hal Raglan in David Cronenberg’s The Brood. Both films complicate the relationship of psychiatry to women who, in both cases, are hiding something under their surface: a cat person and the capacity for parthenogenetic birth.

Male-dominated psychiatry has a lousy history when it comes to women, a history both Cat People and The Brood reflect, one probably more consciously than the other. Throughout Cronenberg’s oeuvre, scientific institutions like the fictional psychoplasmics of Raglan prove to be at least as destructive as they are helpful, if not far more so, particularly towards marginalized populations. I dare say few bodies of work are as relevant as Cronenberg’s in the age of Facebook and Netflix. “Open up for me, Max. I’ve got something I want to play for you.” The Cronenbergian is more threatening to the status quo than the Lynchian, which is why the former will never attain the same sort of cult (or even pop) status.

If Lynch is the patron saint of the now-mainstreamed bizarre, Oliver in Cat People is the terrifying apex of normalcy in all its evil. Irena may be hiding a terrifying (read: queer) cat person beneath the surface, but sometimes there’s absolutely nothing lurking beneath, and that’s when I get really scared.

[originally posted here]