Girl 27 (2007)

 This documentary film by David Stenn tells the story of a 1937 Hollywood rape of a girl, only 17, who worked as a movie chorus dancer.

David Stenn is a movie star biographer and he was finishing up a book on Jean Harlow when he came across newspaper clippings about this rape at a convention of MGM national salesmen brought to Hollywood in celebration of a very successful profit year for MGM products in the middle of The Great Depression. But the old-time Hollywood writer and MGM expert was clueless about this particular case. He made this movie that chronicles his investigation and what he finds.

The result is a document that presents a rape victim still dealing with the horror of the attack 60 years after the fact. It is a film that clearly shows what trauma does to someone. Stenn tracks this victim down and Patricia Douglas (age 85) is interviewed on-camera eventually after he gently made her feel safe enough to let him in to talk. She had stopped letting people in because of the rape. She didn’t trust people after what happened to her so long ago.

She had a sort of a life after that. She even had a daughter, but was too traumatized to properly raise her and farmed her out to grandma. We see the daughter too, maybe it was better that she didn’t live with Patricia who spent her days in bed. Maybe by exiling the daughter she helped save her from the trauma getting passed on to her. (The daughter seems to have it together with a stylish appearance and a horse ranch in northern California. But looks can be deceiving and this movie is not about her.)

Stenn’s film also reveals the cover-up of the rape. Patricia Douglas attempted to get justice. But this was LA in the 30's it was a movie industry town and MGM was the big cat on the screens of the world. The more info I get on Louis B Mayer the more of a scum he turns out to be. I mean one only has to see Girl 27 and Mank with Mayer shown as a powerful negative Republican businessman.

So we are back to the tight headshot of the elderly Patricia Douglas video interview when she reveals all 60 years later. Her daughter has never heard about this at all. Her mother was just a little off all those years.

So in the year before she dies Patricia Douglas finally speaks, is heard, listened to, and believed.
60 years later.
Imagine all the Hollywood girls raped and silent.
A cast of THOUSANDS!
----------------

The documentary uses some 30s Hollywood movie scenes to illustrate the depiction of the treatment of women on the screen then in rape scenes in which of course the rape never occurs. Then he shows scene from a suppressed 1933 melodrama called The Story of Temple Drake in which a rape does happen and it is part of the drama.
This movie was, according to the documentary, unavailable in 2007 but it is available now and bootlegged on Youtube. It’s a pretty good movie. Miriam Hopkins is good as Temple and Jack La Rue at his sleaziest as the rapist thug. 
It’s the 30s so the rapist is a gangster thug not the guy next door, but an interesting little movie anyway.

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

  This is kind of a two for one; it’s an investigation into the Manson Family case as well as a memoir of the 20 years of work, the ups and downs, of the writer Tom O’Neill (co-author Dan Piepenbring is never mentioned) put into this project.

  It does have a happy ending. It started as a featured article for Premiere magazine. After delays and extensions, since O’Neill needed more time, the magazine ended up folding and the project was orphaned for a while with the investigator living on savings and family loans. About a year later it was picked up by a book publisher, eventually dropped and then adopted by another producing the published book.That’s the happy ending of the personal memoir part of the book, not that he solved the case.

  The investigation and what it revealed is of course more complicated and still muddy, smeared with intentional official cover-up by various parties for each their own reasons that range from cops just covering their own tracks to the secrecy of CIA MK-ULTRA mind control experimentation connected to it all.   
It’s the CIA MK-ULTRA stuff that I find most interesting. I’m kind of a buff for mind control info as well as The Red Scare, strange and troubling mid-20th Century USA big world happenings and reactions that I think we are still feeling the ripples from. This was their search for truth serums, mind control assassins, and a lot of just dosing people with LSD and other brain altering chemicals just to see what happened or how suggestable the subject would then become. I assume I am saying “kind of a buff” to distinguish from a full-on “conspiracy theorist”. I’m not entirely sure that there is some ultimate truth that can be acquired with a lot of this murky stuff and it might not lead to a very productive life. There are probably countless Tom O’Neill’s out there without official paper publication, guys, and probably mostly guys, who have thrown a lot of their energy and time into finding out the truth of this or that in a long or meandering trail that eventually takes us to Qannon and “Stop the Steal!”. One can picture “The Truth” as a shining city in the distance, but the long dirt road leading there is littered with bones and corpses of varying decay, some still being picked over by the buzzards. With certain ones I just decide what I want to believe. Like; I want to believe that the CIA murdered JFK because the story is very dramatic and makes sense, fits, with some things that have gone on since.

  All this is part of the Manson story because he spent some time while on parole in LA, in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury, maybe acquiring the mind control abilities and forming the family. The MK-ULTRA connection here might be David Smith who ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. In the book it comes off as an interesting place. First, it did provide a real service, a needed one free health care in a non-judgemental hip atmosphere. But it was free like FaceBook is free. We give them data for the service. We get the benefit and then sometimes wonder if we are giving up too much of ourselves in the bargain. The man who created and ran the free clinic was funded by MK-ULTRA to study group dynamics with drugs involved, speed. According to the book, The Family was more into speed than LSD at the time of the murders. Speed, we can assume, is a much better substance to do ones murdering with.
The implication is that Manson was kind of sent there, being on parole in LA it was odd that his parole officer also named Smith (Roger Smith) would let him move like that. Could Manson have been a mind control subject that went berserk or even one that did exactly as planned to make the communal hippies look like potentially a homicidal gang instead of their day-glow flower power free love image?

There is also murky stuff going on with Terry Melcher and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosii. Did Melcher lie on the witness stand and did he visit Manson and the family three times AFTER the Tate murders out at Spahn and Baker ranches?

There is this crazy story about Vincent Bugliosi harassing the family of a milkman because he thought the guy was the father of Bugliosii’s own child. This was even before the famous trial.

    Chaos is multi-layered, well written, with the data not as confusing as it could be, a true crime, memoir, and conspiracy book.
It is rather satisfying if one is looking for that sort of thing. Not that I’m anything other than an occasional reader of the genre.
I liked it. 
Do I have conclusions on the Manson case? Not really, other than not believing the official story and feeling that something was definitely going on there beyond what we were told. Glad that they were not murdering acidheads, but speed users instead, because I like to think that psychedelics are more helpful than harmful because I think they have been for me. 

The Guru’s Touch: A novel by Robert G. Schneider

 The Guru’s Touch

by Robert G. Schneider

Here is an unusual novel. It is the story of a young USA man’s four year involvement with a cult headed by an Indian guru and his enablers.  
Kind of, The Other Side of The Razor’s Edge. 

It all starts out in Ithaca NY. I liked that because I’ve spent some time up there so am somewhat familiar with the gorge-ous little college city that it is. Doug, narrates his own story here so we get a chance to really get inside the head, the thoughts, of this youth fresh out of high school whose mother has just died of cancer. The character of Doug ends up being very believable and realistic. Yes, his mother has just died, dad sometime before, but he is a typical emotionally repressed teen boy. He hasn’t necessarily developed the skills to deal with his emotions in a productive way. Older sister is now kind of house mom in the family home, they don’t get along. He wants control over his own life but the money is in trusts or in control of big sister who has her own ideas about what Doug ought to be doing. Bowing to her pressure, he enrolls in Cornell, taking an inappropriate major he is not interested in. (Doug is asking for trouble with this bowing to others.) He doesn’t participate and ends up flunking out.

Doug’s older brother and sister in law are into this particular guru. He gets the book through them and falls for the whole thing. In a way this is a love story. In his naive innocence he is really touched by the book and is soon off to the ashram in the Catskils and on from there.

Since the novel is in first person it is presented with an option of really showing what is up with Doug. As he gets more info about the rotten structure of the place and the guru himself, the question eventually gets down to, “How and why can he remain?” That’s the whole point of reading a novel like this, to get some insight into overwise puzzling behavior.  
All this is well performed in the novel. He was touched, he was touched by “LOVE” and it transformed him in ways that were physically real to him. Like any other love story, that first encounter, touch, eye gaze, the feeling of being seen, acknowledged as someone who matters. That’s how the love begins here as in so many other relationships. But watch out for being blinded by the afterglow so as not to see that you are being dominated, bullied, kept in work without pay, and belittled the opposite side of mattering. 

He is forever reminding himself to have “right thinking”, basically the guru is a god and the teacher and you are too lowly to understand his ways so just go along to get your enlightenment 

This is a 700 page novel. Robert G. Schneider uses that length maybe as a tool to show us the tedious repetition of the work and devotional duties of the disciples. He generates a good deal of suspense as well. Is it an enjoyable read? Yes
I would recommend it to anyone interested in cults, . . . or love, I guess.

West Side Story (2021)

 This is going to be a very subjective view of the experience of this fine movie.

Death and loss. 

It’s all about death.
For me, more than ever. I was in a hospital with my dying brother weeks ago. I was asked to help him fill out a, get to know the personality of the patient, chart there. One of the questions was: “What is your favorite movie? Without hesitation my brother, who was in fact having trouble speaking, said, “West Side Story”. Of course he meant the 1960 version. He did not live to see this new version.
West Side Story feels like something always in my life. My parents saw the movie and I think they took me to it after seeing it themselves. I remember seeing it at The Palace Theater in Canton, Ohio. The most beautiful theater in Canton (Still).
The LP of the movie soundtrack was always in the house. I knew the record, the music, before I saw the movie. So the tunes of the cinema versions are embedded into me. Happy to say that these orchestrations remain in the new version. It has been some years since I watched 1960, after all it is a heartbreaking tragic story that I don’t want to feel in the mood to go into. I mean, I know what happens and none of it is good. Other than the music and dancing and moments of lovers adoring one another it is all tragic with death just around the corner of the next block. This time I couldn’t even enjoy the beauty of the love scenes because love is at least heartbreak and here multiple deaths. The love brings about the death and the heartbreak. I am writing from the deadly side of love, the side that feels like death, even a welcome death with its respite from the pain and the guarantee of no more pain and heartbreak. The place of being but no longer wanting to be unintentionally but surely the one who causes love that turns to heartbreak, and deadly pain. The immortal pain that can only die with its container. The pain of love and separation that I know will survive me as long as the others, the ones I have hurt, live. It is immortal within them until their “time”. It lives within me, in rhythm with my heartbeats.

  There is no “Place for Us”. There are only the places we and our kind inhabit temporarily until the next wave of conquerors, human of otherside sweeps through to move us on. In the 2021 movie the whole neighborhood is being leveled. Doc, and now, Vaeintina’s store setting is right at the edge of demolition and everyone in the movie is going to be made homeless, moved out, Here Comes Progress.
So maybe Somewhere is the most tragic song. It is an impossible dream home of doomed humans. 
I know there is no place for me. Too impoverished for one place, too rich and foregin for another. In the first I can feel pushed upon and out, in the second I’m part of the group, the gentrifiers, who are pushing and making things more difficult for those who actually belong here compared to the gringo’s come lately. There is a line in the movie that demanded my attention in that way:
Chino -- “Sooner or later the gringos kill everything.”
Maybe even ourselves and our winner-take-all-so-everyone-loses culture.

Within the frame of all this death there are luminous moments of incredible human beauty, the fantastic score by Leonard Bernstein matched with young Stephen Sonheim’s beautiful word emotions. 

If that is taken out to the move the whole experience would be unbearable. In this the movie is very true to life and death.
Our moments of music, dancing, poetry, stories, imagery: our moments of connection and love are all that we have, and only for a moment. We can extend that moment and live in it, in denial of the impending death, we can live with contentment.

West Side Story 2021 is a great movie. West Side Story (1960) is a great movie. They are made great by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sonhiem. If the filmmaker doesn't mess with and alter that core it is hard to fail in a production of it. 

Off hand I think I prefer much of the 1960 dancing. Certainly the opening dance of The Jets.
I think the lovers meeting at the dance in the gym are staged better, far more realistically and out of view of the others, in the Spielberg movie. 
  Having Tony sing cool was an interesting and appropriate choice over the forgettable minor character who had it in 1960. It made more sense this way and the physical battle/dance of Tony and Riff really well done.
Not convinced of Valentina given a go at Somewhere, other than drilling in that it is only a dream and there is no Somewhere.
Maria’s reprise of “Only You, you’re the only thing I see forever“ 
was an improvement over a reprise of Somewhere. Because there is not place for Tony and Maria and the only place Tony will be in in Maria’s heart memory.

Open By Rachel Krantz

 One thing I wonder about how this book is titled and marketed is that what it is actually about is buried, not stated.

The title is OPEN and the subtitle reads,
AN UNCENSORED MEMOIR OF LOVE, LIBERATION, AND NON-MONOGAMY–A POLYAMORY MEMOIR

Yet the main story of the book is a dominant/submissive relationship.
Specifically one of a very patriarchal structure that played with the roles of Daddy-Little Girl (LG). To me this is the main story and conflict of the book; the need of Adam to play Daddy and the younger Rachel going alone with it until Opening, learning, and realizing, the distortions of equality inherent in the power structure of such a way of sexual play that bled into daily domestic couple cohabational living.

I don’t understand how this type of stark powerplay is sustainable in a relationship. I can see how it could work as an occasional role play thing, a “let's pretend” for the night that one is the dom and the other is the submissive, but in the relationship of Adam and Rachel it is a constant backdrop setting in their daily lives.
She is submissive to how Adam wants things in the home, even to the extent of how the toothpaste tube is maintained to inny or outy of the toilet paper roll. All this is the major drama of the story, the older Adam is the leader, the teacher, and Rachel is there to receive instruction in a system of punishment and reward. This is flat out apparent domestic patriarchal control.  
There are views of human social development that hold that the dominant patriarchy emerger with notions of ownership, property, out to the move from hunter-gatherer structures into agriculture.
“My land, my crops, my wife, my children” all of which are subject to exchange as value in the marketplace. This is the root and basic structure of modern living for the past few centuries; the core of the extremes of capitalism that we are trying to live with today with results that vary. (Some say no one is happy in this, living with this type of tension, that what is mine must always be built, must grow, and must be protected from the others who have less, but who don’t understand that they need to have less for the whole of this to work. It’s biblical even “The poor are always with you.” so don’t even try to change it because that is the way God wants it, even though these poor get to want and need and must always be kept under control and not in the way of growth and progress of the rich which if they are lucky in post-scarcity have something “trickle down” to their benefit.)

So while Adam and Rachel are modern liberal/progessive in their ideation of themselves, in the core of their primary relationship they want to play rich/poor, daddy-owner/little-girl-owned (“My Girl”) as if these role are basic, real, and how a life should be structured.

This seems to me well beyond the role-playing that goes on when I corporate powerman who occasionally needs to go to a BDSM dungeon to take on a submissive role under a hired dominate before returning to his daily life of having to maintain the structures around lord and master of his domain.

I heard Rachel Krantz on a few podcasts. On one she suggested that people listen to the audiobook version of her book. Then the reader/listener can more easily get more out of what she is trying to say through her self-reading voice. That may be so but it makes it harder to underline, make notes in the margins to be referenced later in looking back on the experience of the book like I’m trying to do now.

Toward the end of it she says that earlier test readers of her text told her that they hated the Adam character and that she didn’t want that.
That is the way I felt about him myself. I’m not one that goes in for dominant, know-it-all masterful characters, be they ones in our media stories, the stark and cartoonish Donald Trump, or the slightly lesser Elon Musk or whomever (and yes, they are always MEN).
I come away from this wondering what is the deal with the Adam character. Why does he not want to progress? I know that many of us males who came up out of the 20th Century were socially conditioned to accept patriarchy as just the way it is, and further, ought to be. But don’t we want to grow beyond that into something more just, equitable, and righteous, rather than just accepting and living by these conditioned artificial structures? Isn’t that the inner and outer work of one, male or female, who wants to build a better world. So what is the deal with someone like Adam who continues to want to play patriarchy daily in his home, wants to dominate, while at the same time seeing himself as intelligent, thoughtful, and progessive? Is it all in service of sexual erotism, of keeping a tension, to keep the other in a role that makes his cock hard because of the way he learned out of the Playboy Generaltion?

Rachel can be excused as the innocent in the horror movie with the audience saying, “No, don’t open that door!!” But what of the dom Adam? Why does he continue to behave in this way and not try to push himself beyond his conditioning?  

On to the OPEN part of the story, the polyamory.
Personally this is easy for me having been involved for decades, my entire life with polyamouus activity and assumption that these structures are normal and even as it should more naturally be. Like in the matriarcal sexuality of bonobos, etc.
Yet in the book even some of the poly-play areas are in the control of patriarchy. Adam and Rachel explore old school patriarchal based “Lifestyle” “Swinging” where is it OK and encouraged that women openly have sex with one another, even for the entertainment of the men, while the males must never exhibit even the vague desire or curiosity for same-sex, male on male play. Krantz tells us that some of the men she has played with in these Lifestyle spaces later feel safe privatedly to reveal that they do have some interest in sex with other men. Yet this must be strictly out of view and closeted in these “swinger” set ups. Will we ever be able to progress beyond that?

Something about the book struck me as just sad in my hopes for progress here. We continue to be stuck in this male dominated structure that only will have it a certain way. Does each generation have to learn this themselves rather than build on the experience of previous revolutionary activity?    

         

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

 I just picked this one off the shelf in a library branch in Queens. It is my first Wolitzer. Actually I had her confused with someone else (Elizabeth Wurtzel).

This is a rather fine novel of a marriage. It tracks through the entire relationship in a full, deep and brisk 219 pages. Deep? It feels like she has basically told the whole story of this marriage. The novel is written from the wife’s point of view. She, Joan, and Joe, the husband, are heading to Helsinki where he has been awarded a prize for his body of work as a now aging novelist. He has been very successful. Success in the way that novelists, through maybe the 1960s, were in the USA. Big stars. Not so now. Most can’t sell enough to make a living and augment that by teaching.
At the beginning of their relationship, he is a married Smith professor of creative writing and she is a student. He has not been published yet, except for a short story in a small literature magazine. She reads it and doesn’t like it but doesn’t let on.

They end up together. He abandons wife, a very young daughter, and his job as they run off to NYC together.
The wife tells us of their early 1950s days in Greenwich Village with the other writers. A lot of the focus is of the sexual break down, the women’s roles is this and the men’s is that. The wives take care of the husbands who are more or less needy babies.
She goes through the 1960s feminist wave and shows a simmering resentment that has built up over a life of service. She was a writer when at Smith and her work was very good, but she gave it up for Joe. Took care of the babies for Joe. She was the good wife in many ways and the resentment she shows in her 64 year old voice is completely understandable and clear. Except hubby, a bit older and the king of the world as this great novelist doesn’t see it. He doesn’t want to see it. He would have to deal with it if he let himself see it.
In the surprising wrap up of the story we all find out why.

The novel has a lot to say about these old school, post agricultural marriages. With their strict double standard of rules and roles. This has been changing some for people younger than those characters in the novel. Are these marriages better, more equitable? Maybe, or maybe they are just shorter and people walk away from a structure that is not working. Perhaps that is more of the cause of our trouble in relationships. The structure just doesn’t fit what people want. Is it that the men have not absorbed the social changes implied with feminism as some of the women surely have? Or is it that once we are in these relationships there is a tendency to fall back on the way it always was in our parent’s generation, those that came before them?

This is a terrific story of a marriage and it is very well performed by Meg Wolitzer’s fine writing.
One would hope a reader would put this down and wonder if either of these marriage roles is right for them.

Marwencol (2010)

Directed by Jeff Malmberg

This is a documentary about the work of Mark Hogancamp. He lives in Kingston, NY, one of those old milltowns up the river from NYC. He lives in a permanently fixed prefab trailer type home.
He makes detailed WWII type scenes with dolls in the yard outside his trailer. He does this to deal with his loneliness, which might have always been a part of his life, but is now much worse because of brain damage and emotional trauma he suffered after a vicious attack by 5 men outside a Kingston bar. Before this happened he didn’t do that type of work. He shows some old notebooks before drawings. He says he can’t draw anymore.
He works out the trauma of his attack by creating scenarios of the SS dolls attacking and torturing the doll character of himself.

He has an interesting story to tell and does. He is on camera talking a lot throughout the movie.
One might wonder though how this is all done. The documentary doesn't go into any detail. All the dolls have excellent uniforms, they have small rifle replicas, (“This is a BAR.”) even the faces seem more expressive than just Barbie, Ken, or GI Joe dolls, but maybe that is a projection of a viewer seeing them in the settings with full costumes and movie still placement setups for the photos he takes.
Where did the costumes come from? Is he making them himself? Where does he buy all this stuff?
Nevertheless it’s an interesting film. In the hate filled USA, he survived and made something of himself with reasons to go on. Good for him. 

There is a feature film with Steve Carell playing Mark Hogancamp. Mediaglut has not seen this, just the documentary, and probably won’t bother watching it either.