Sep 3, 2023·edited Sep 3, 2023Liked by Peebo Preboskenes
I wish someone would write or explore the idea, or point me to an older movie which covers the idea, of how it might be that people with a rough earlier life, maybe abused or having suffered some human caused trauma seem to be wiser and less susceptible to being suckered later in life. One thing that doesn't seem to sit right with me about Gittes is that he's this cynical private detective who lived through seeing everything in Chinatown and yet he's surprised this powerful monster incested his daughter. Polanski, who supposedly pimped out Sharon Tate on film to other Hollywooders (Nicholson?), must have had a dilemma, what to put in the film to shock the audience to point of visceral sympathy for Dunaway, knowing as a debauche that showing the reality of his own life for example would have just shocked the audience of that day to visceral disgust. Overall, I'm trying to understand what made me a sucker for most of my life, was it partially the protected early existence of a two parent household with a low level of unjustified whippings, or is it something I was just born with. Recently, I've come to wonder if every thinking person eventually gets a healthy dose of cynicism just from interaction with his fellow humans, though perhaps those who took their abuse young, if they can recover from the damage, as it seems Dunaway hadn't, can lead more productive lives than those who are naive and actually labor in darkness until they get a big whack upside the head courtesy of reality.
So much in there. So many good questions. So few satisfying answers. As I get older I realize how limited are the answers we come up with -- that they are just the excuses we formulate so we can have done with a question and move on.
Why did I do a particular thing? Well, here's logical reponse 1, response 2... they're all just smoke. Found this quote that gets at this: "the rejection of any sort of a priori justification leads inexorably to a severe skepticism and to the undermining of reasoning or argument in general". And we simply can't have that. Not if we want to UNDERSTAND.
Reasons are just the excuses we give to the actions we take that derive from passions we can never understand.
So much of what we are is innate. Most of us have some traumatic or difficult childhood experiences that could lead us to some deeper wisdom or skepticism but that all depends on who we are, which is not easy to know.
It's gonna get personal here so be forewarned. In my own early life there was a lot of what appeared to me to be irrational behavior surrounding me. My brothers experienced the same events and behaviors I did and yet they came away with entirely different kinds of life-lessons and ways of interacting with the world than I did. Why is that? I can come up with some ideas but in the end they are unsatisfying because the things I think are so obviously staring me in the face they just didn't see. And no amount of discussion or debate with them has ever changed that.
I do know that my wife has been a powerful influence on my understanding of all that childhood trauma and helped me to become a stronger, more independent person. The unconscious psyops that went on in my family during my childhood were constant. We were like an alcoholic family without the alcohol. My family doesn't say it, but they behave as if she sort of Svengali'd me away from them. The fact is I was already half way out the door my whole life and as things fell apart more and more, and their behaviors became more erratic and destructive, they really left me no choice. There are only so many times one can stick a hand into the bandsaw before calling it quits. They blame her. I blame... well I try not to cast blame. They know not what they do and never the twain shall meet.
I sometimes look back on all that and think "what a rube I was". But that innocence that made me a "rube" was also a source of strength -- I was open and didn't fearfully turn away from any ideas that might lead towards truth. There are worse things than being taken in by manipulations.
I recall that Polanski had an extremely traumatic childhood, losing both his parents in the Holocaust, his earliest years in the Krakow ghetto, raised in foster homes... the whole tragic horrorshow so many experienced in that era. He somehow rose from that to become a brilliant director. Who knows what traumas he had to suppress in order to simply move forward with his life and career?
I don't know if those stories about pimping out his wife were true but they certainly might be. We all know about his pedophilia so why not some wife-pimping? I can also imagine that, despite the rumors of his pimping creepiness, having his wife and unborn child slaughtered by the Manson family would have done a further number on an already clearly damaged mind that sent him off into his powerful desires for that young girl. Or maybe he would've done it anyway.
All we can do is attempt to learn, in our stumbling and imperfect ways, how to live with the selves we have. To become enlightened through love and understanding, as much as we can, and to find some contentment and happiness within our disquieted souls.
That is so insightful. I think I take from what you're saying is to try and understand yourself and accept yourself for who you are and go on and live your life. I DO tend to wallow in overthinking things instead of just getting on with the living. I'm also very lucky in having the wife I have.
I practice my own advice as much as I can. I try to get out of habits of thinking but it's hit and miss. Vital to have someone to help break you out of your worn pathways.
I guess that's the sign of a great book and a great movie. Helps to break habits of thinking. Great choice on Chinatown. I guess the same can be said of writers and directors, so thanks, Polanski:).
This thread has made me think of something along the line of , "To make great art requires great suffering." I think that is how I heard it. It may be a truism, or maybe not.
It's funny you're writing about LA today. I was just listening to a Williamson/Weinstein podcast today about J. Epstein. Weinstein said that Epstein is anti-interesting in that no journalistic outlet wants to publicly investigate what kind of construct Epstein was. And I then thought of the final scene of To Live and Die in LA when the dweeb cop takes over the dead cop's slave/source and the cycle continues. Probably something just picked up Epstein's network and is working them themselves.
Speaking of Polanski (who was his own kind of monster with a vision) and conspiracies, you may enjoy the recent book Chaos, which delves into some of the surprising government involvement in some of aspects of the Manson Family murders and Hollywood and LA more generally. For example, Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson, was a bizarre stalker who harassed his former milkman claiming he had had an affair with his wife. Weird stuff.
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties https://a.co/d/0MjPuNS
I've been thinking about mk-ultra some more since I'm thinking about the post-war era generally. Not sure if you've seen it, but there's a documentary called Wormwood by Errol Morris. It's quite recent, 5 episodes I think. He sits there with the son of a man who led the biowarfare work at Fort Dietrich on those early experiments and who was thrown out a window of a hotel in NYC in the 1950s by the CIA because they had dosed him with LSD at a retreat and he cracked and they were worried he might go public.
They go through this poor guy's life, and his father's, and the incident itself, for they are able to piece a remarkable amount of info together -- much of it viscerally terrifying -- from interviews with some of the creeps involved to a hair-raising story told by one of the switch-board operators at the hotel on the night of the assassination. It's a must-watch IMO but that's not my main point.
When I think back to the post-WWII era -- the paranoia, the extremely efficient but also quite unhinged people like Sidney Gottlieb and many others who led and managed mk-ultra -- Jolyon West - Jolly West FFS -- the mass experiments on prisoners and mental patients and some of the direct actions and blowback we know about -- from Sirhan Sirhan, to Charles Manson, to Ted Kaczynski, Mark David Chapman, to lord knows how many of the serial killers and mass murderers that cropped up out of those generations -- the monstrous, horrifying Korean War almost no one knows much about -- Vietnam of course and the drug-running operations of the CIA at the time to fund their black ops in Laos, Cambodia, etc.
Timothy Leary's work with the CIA, dosing people without their knowledge on the streets and observing them -- the movie Inherent Vice touches on the feel of that era in it's own way --combined with the lobotomies that were in fashion and all the other "doctors", mk-ultra affiliated and not who pushed on with their insane projects -- Dr Ewen Cameron in Canada who was brilliant but had megalomaniacal control over his "patients" -- the way this whole gaggle of monsters seemed to be caught up in their own version of bio-techno mania, fascinated by the "counter-culture", who were infested within it and partook in the orgies and drug-use as well -- and how it was all conveniently swept under the rug thanks to the "mysterious" warehouse fire that destroyed most of the documentation of all that shit... all the assassinations and attempted assassinations.
My point is, well, just that where the fuck did all that insane energy and activity come from and why is it that many know about Mengele but not much about this far more wide-spread and systematic series of projects and plans down to today where we're, even post-covid, still funding biowarfare experiments all over the world. One simple answer is people don't WANT to know because it was their own govt that did all this. Another is the cover-ups and psyops to keep people from knowing.
But at the root of it is the fact that our image of scientists and scientific "discovery" is so confused and misunderstood. An old gentleman I knew who worked on the Manhattan Project -- Alsos to be precise -- a devout Catholic and a man of real principle -- and who worked for Bell Labs after the war for many decades -- he told me the last people we should ever let in charge of anything are scientists. And yet we maintain this pseudo-religious faith in their abilities -- the things they believe they can do but really cannot -- that they are some sort of disinterested almost Apollonian wise men when they are really as ambitious, careerist and corruptible as any banker, politician or military general. I guess it's all just too convenient for the power structure to think they can harness this work and use it for their mad totalitarian control purposes to ever let go.
But getting back to that post-WWII era. What was it that motivated these insane projects? Was it the shock of WWII that deranged vast swathes of an entire generation -- the paranoia and also justified fear regarding the Soviets -- all the movies that promised the magical power of science to cure all society's ills? It's so difficult to understand all this for someone who grew up without these experiences or impulses.
I recall Alfred Nobel who stabilized, more or less, nitro-glycerine, or the guy who invented chlorine gas, the nuclear engineers -- so many of them thought they had invented THE weapon that would end all war only to see the monstrous powers they had unleashed deployed and used without the slightest pause. And yet on and on we go.
I guess one way to understand it is as a handmaiden to the political totalitarian impulse to devour and enslave entire populations. Perhaps it's the all-too-human psychological phenomenon to despise what we think we want and finally achieve: the death impulse inherent in the act of creation. Perhaps it would take some kind of Jungian genius to explore even some of this terrain and help to understand it because all the reasons and cause-effect thinking I try to come up with just doesn't satisfy. In the end it may be as simple as "we do it because we can".
We see that nuclear button and no matter how hard we may try not to push it, knowing full well what it will lead to, eventually our curiosity and desire to actually experience what happens will drive us mad until we finally do.
I think somehow it's tied up in the energy of the American psyche: the same drive that pushed so many to leave their homes in the past 2 centuries, to come to a new land, all the optimism that suggests, also has a shadow-self that compels us onward towards the forbidden, the unknown. When we ran out of frontier the frontier turned in on itself.
I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know. In the end what does knowing even do? It's not like it will stop this crazy train.
I was thinking the same thing as I was writing it :).
Yves Smith over at NakedCapitalism had a good take on the Men Who Stare At Goats: that the whole thing was a psyop to distract from the real horrific shit they were up to.
I saw an interview with O'Neill a few years ago on Joe Rogan when the book came out. Fascinating story about the writing of that book and what he found. The conspiracies never end in this country.
Sep 2, 2023·edited Sep 2, 2023Liked by Peebo Preboskenes
Outstanding piece with really insightful points about the nature of conspiracies and the people who forge them.
I'd like to think my blurting out a Cross quote the other day had some small part in its creation, but I suspect you were going to watch Chinatown for the nth time and write this regardless of my movie quote Tourette's haha
Also, great use of synecdoche and Grand Guignol in the same article. I'm jealous.
Actually, it may have done. For some reason a few days ago I all the sudden had the urge to watch Chinatown again and it smacked me in the face how it's one of the great conspiracy movies. As I wrote, it's not an easy film to watch. Huston is so damned good it makes me grateful he was an artist and not a power hungry oligarch. With his powers he might've taken over the world.
Sep 3, 2023·edited Sep 3, 2023Liked by Peebo Preboskenes
To be completely candid, the more I read about the world today, from the protected elites frequenting Esptein Island to the web of corruption in the Biden Crime Family, I fear that people like Noah Cross have indeed taken over the world. Hell, at least Huston had a certain gravitas, unlike these disgusting reprobates!
It's all that fiat money floating around that's created this class of unaccountable, insanely corrupt filth. They don't build anything, they don't fix anything and yet they keep piling more money into their "investments" and offshore accounts.
It will all come down at some point and when it does all their "riches" and power will be shown for what they are: smoke and mirrors.
Holy sheee-it! I've never seen this film. That clip was fantastic. Will check it out for sure.
Brando is fantastic too. Did you ever see Reflections in a Golden Eye? It's a very disturbing film with Brando and Liz Taylor about an officer on a southern military base and his wife. Based on a book by Carson McCullers. There are two versions -- one in a gold hazy print and the other in full color -- which I've never seen done before. The gold hazy print is somehow more disturbing but the color one is prettier and still upsetting enough. It's not a masterpiece, but definitely worth a watch and directed by John Huston so you can't go too far wrong.
Oh fuck no. I don't go near Flannery O'Connor anymore. My wife loves her writing. I think she's brilliant but so fucking dark. It's strange that I found Wise Blood harder to watch than Chinatown. Perhaps it's because Chinatown is so beautifully shot that it makes the horror easier to view. Wise Blood has that faded 1970s poor, down and out American desperation thing going on that leaves me so entirely hopeless I want to shoot myself. Dourif is amazing as always and Harry Dean Stanton as well. But no. I don't have many hard lines but this is one. You can talk to my wife about it, she loves it. :)
It was just pointed out to me that I have such a hard time with O'Connor's work because her characters' motivations are so much harder to understand. It's just so chaotic and terrifying. I mean, say what you want about Noah Cross, and he is a monster, at least we can get some sense of why he does what he does.
Sep 2, 2023·edited Sep 3, 2023Liked by Peebo Preboskenes
It never got dark enough for either me or Huston, who seems to have had a personal obsession with adapting some of the 20th century's bleakest literary masterpieces to film.
Heh, my wife just watched that one a few weeks ago. Perhaps you're an actual artist like Huston or my wife. Real artists want to perceive it all to the depths, and can handle it, even like it there.
I'm just a dumb drummer from the Bronx who likes dogs and the occasional joint.
I wish someone would write or explore the idea, or point me to an older movie which covers the idea, of how it might be that people with a rough earlier life, maybe abused or having suffered some human caused trauma seem to be wiser and less susceptible to being suckered later in life. One thing that doesn't seem to sit right with me about Gittes is that he's this cynical private detective who lived through seeing everything in Chinatown and yet he's surprised this powerful monster incested his daughter. Polanski, who supposedly pimped out Sharon Tate on film to other Hollywooders (Nicholson?), must have had a dilemma, what to put in the film to shock the audience to point of visceral sympathy for Dunaway, knowing as a debauche that showing the reality of his own life for example would have just shocked the audience of that day to visceral disgust. Overall, I'm trying to understand what made me a sucker for most of my life, was it partially the protected early existence of a two parent household with a low level of unjustified whippings, or is it something I was just born with. Recently, I've come to wonder if every thinking person eventually gets a healthy dose of cynicism just from interaction with his fellow humans, though perhaps those who took their abuse young, if they can recover from the damage, as it seems Dunaway hadn't, can lead more productive lives than those who are naive and actually labor in darkness until they get a big whack upside the head courtesy of reality.
So much in there. So many good questions. So few satisfying answers. As I get older I realize how limited are the answers we come up with -- that they are just the excuses we formulate so we can have done with a question and move on.
Why did I do a particular thing? Well, here's logical reponse 1, response 2... they're all just smoke. Found this quote that gets at this: "the rejection of any sort of a priori justification leads inexorably to a severe skepticism and to the undermining of reasoning or argument in general". And we simply can't have that. Not if we want to UNDERSTAND.
Reasons are just the excuses we give to the actions we take that derive from passions we can never understand.
So much of what we are is innate. Most of us have some traumatic or difficult childhood experiences that could lead us to some deeper wisdom or skepticism but that all depends on who we are, which is not easy to know.
It's gonna get personal here so be forewarned. In my own early life there was a lot of what appeared to me to be irrational behavior surrounding me. My brothers experienced the same events and behaviors I did and yet they came away with entirely different kinds of life-lessons and ways of interacting with the world than I did. Why is that? I can come up with some ideas but in the end they are unsatisfying because the things I think are so obviously staring me in the face they just didn't see. And no amount of discussion or debate with them has ever changed that.
I do know that my wife has been a powerful influence on my understanding of all that childhood trauma and helped me to become a stronger, more independent person. The unconscious psyops that went on in my family during my childhood were constant. We were like an alcoholic family without the alcohol. My family doesn't say it, but they behave as if she sort of Svengali'd me away from them. The fact is I was already half way out the door my whole life and as things fell apart more and more, and their behaviors became more erratic and destructive, they really left me no choice. There are only so many times one can stick a hand into the bandsaw before calling it quits. They blame her. I blame... well I try not to cast blame. They know not what they do and never the twain shall meet.
I sometimes look back on all that and think "what a rube I was". But that innocence that made me a "rube" was also a source of strength -- I was open and didn't fearfully turn away from any ideas that might lead towards truth. There are worse things than being taken in by manipulations.
I recall that Polanski had an extremely traumatic childhood, losing both his parents in the Holocaust, his earliest years in the Krakow ghetto, raised in foster homes... the whole tragic horrorshow so many experienced in that era. He somehow rose from that to become a brilliant director. Who knows what traumas he had to suppress in order to simply move forward with his life and career?
I don't know if those stories about pimping out his wife were true but they certainly might be. We all know about his pedophilia so why not some wife-pimping? I can also imagine that, despite the rumors of his pimping creepiness, having his wife and unborn child slaughtered by the Manson family would have done a further number on an already clearly damaged mind that sent him off into his powerful desires for that young girl. Or maybe he would've done it anyway.
All we can do is attempt to learn, in our stumbling and imperfect ways, how to live with the selves we have. To become enlightened through love and understanding, as much as we can, and to find some contentment and happiness within our disquieted souls.
That is so insightful. I think I take from what you're saying is to try and understand yourself and accept yourself for who you are and go on and live your life. I DO tend to wallow in overthinking things instead of just getting on with the living. I'm also very lucky in having the wife I have.
I practice my own advice as much as I can. I try to get out of habits of thinking but it's hit and miss. Vital to have someone to help break you out of your worn pathways.
I guess that's the sign of a great book and a great movie. Helps to break habits of thinking. Great choice on Chinatown. I guess the same can be said of writers and directors, so thanks, Polanski:).
This thread has made me think of something along the line of , "To make great art requires great suffering." I think that is how I heard it. It may be a truism, or maybe not.
It's funny you're writing about LA today. I was just listening to a Williamson/Weinstein podcast today about J. Epstein. Weinstein said that Epstein is anti-interesting in that no journalistic outlet wants to publicly investigate what kind of construct Epstein was. And I then thought of the final scene of To Live and Die in LA when the dweeb cop takes over the dead cop's slave/source and the cycle continues. Probably something just picked up Epstein's network and is working them themselves.
On and on the river rolls...
I will say Whitney Webb has done some great work on Epstein. She's a national treasure.
Speaking of Polanski (who was his own kind of monster with a vision) and conspiracies, you may enjoy the recent book Chaos, which delves into some of the surprising government involvement in some of aspects of the Manson Family murders and Hollywood and LA more generally. For example, Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson, was a bizarre stalker who harassed his former milkman claiming he had had an affair with his wife. Weird stuff.
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties https://a.co/d/0MjPuNS
I've been thinking about mk-ultra some more since I'm thinking about the post-war era generally. Not sure if you've seen it, but there's a documentary called Wormwood by Errol Morris. It's quite recent, 5 episodes I think. He sits there with the son of a man who led the biowarfare work at Fort Dietrich on those early experiments and who was thrown out a window of a hotel in NYC in the 1950s by the CIA because they had dosed him with LSD at a retreat and he cracked and they were worried he might go public.
They go through this poor guy's life, and his father's, and the incident itself, for they are able to piece a remarkable amount of info together -- much of it viscerally terrifying -- from interviews with some of the creeps involved to a hair-raising story told by one of the switch-board operators at the hotel on the night of the assassination. It's a must-watch IMO but that's not my main point.
When I think back to the post-WWII era -- the paranoia, the extremely efficient but also quite unhinged people like Sidney Gottlieb and many others who led and managed mk-ultra -- Jolyon West - Jolly West FFS -- the mass experiments on prisoners and mental patients and some of the direct actions and blowback we know about -- from Sirhan Sirhan, to Charles Manson, to Ted Kaczynski, Mark David Chapman, to lord knows how many of the serial killers and mass murderers that cropped up out of those generations -- the monstrous, horrifying Korean War almost no one knows much about -- Vietnam of course and the drug-running operations of the CIA at the time to fund their black ops in Laos, Cambodia, etc.
Timothy Leary's work with the CIA, dosing people without their knowledge on the streets and observing them -- the movie Inherent Vice touches on the feel of that era in it's own way --combined with the lobotomies that were in fashion and all the other "doctors", mk-ultra affiliated and not who pushed on with their insane projects -- Dr Ewen Cameron in Canada who was brilliant but had megalomaniacal control over his "patients" -- the way this whole gaggle of monsters seemed to be caught up in their own version of bio-techno mania, fascinated by the "counter-culture", who were infested within it and partook in the orgies and drug-use as well -- and how it was all conveniently swept under the rug thanks to the "mysterious" warehouse fire that destroyed most of the documentation of all that shit... all the assassinations and attempted assassinations.
My point is, well, just that where the fuck did all that insane energy and activity come from and why is it that many know about Mengele but not much about this far more wide-spread and systematic series of projects and plans down to today where we're, even post-covid, still funding biowarfare experiments all over the world. One simple answer is people don't WANT to know because it was their own govt that did all this. Another is the cover-ups and psyops to keep people from knowing.
But at the root of it is the fact that our image of scientists and scientific "discovery" is so confused and misunderstood. An old gentleman I knew who worked on the Manhattan Project -- Alsos to be precise -- a devout Catholic and a man of real principle -- and who worked for Bell Labs after the war for many decades -- he told me the last people we should ever let in charge of anything are scientists. And yet we maintain this pseudo-religious faith in their abilities -- the things they believe they can do but really cannot -- that they are some sort of disinterested almost Apollonian wise men when they are really as ambitious, careerist and corruptible as any banker, politician or military general. I guess it's all just too convenient for the power structure to think they can harness this work and use it for their mad totalitarian control purposes to ever let go.
But getting back to that post-WWII era. What was it that motivated these insane projects? Was it the shock of WWII that deranged vast swathes of an entire generation -- the paranoia and also justified fear regarding the Soviets -- all the movies that promised the magical power of science to cure all society's ills? It's so difficult to understand all this for someone who grew up without these experiences or impulses.
I recall Alfred Nobel who stabilized, more or less, nitro-glycerine, or the guy who invented chlorine gas, the nuclear engineers -- so many of them thought they had invented THE weapon that would end all war only to see the monstrous powers they had unleashed deployed and used without the slightest pause. And yet on and on we go.
I guess one way to understand it is as a handmaiden to the political totalitarian impulse to devour and enslave entire populations. Perhaps it's the all-too-human psychological phenomenon to despise what we think we want and finally achieve: the death impulse inherent in the act of creation. Perhaps it would take some kind of Jungian genius to explore even some of this terrain and help to understand it because all the reasons and cause-effect thinking I try to come up with just doesn't satisfy. In the end it may be as simple as "we do it because we can".
We see that nuclear button and no matter how hard we may try not to push it, knowing full well what it will lead to, eventually our curiosity and desire to actually experience what happens will drive us mad until we finally do.
I think somehow it's tied up in the energy of the American psyche: the same drive that pushed so many to leave their homes in the past 2 centuries, to come to a new land, all the optimism that suggests, also has a shadow-self that compels us onward towards the forbidden, the unknown. When we ran out of frontier the frontier turned in on itself.
I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know. In the end what does knowing even do? It's not like it will stop this crazy train.
You should write this up as a full post. Jon Ronson wrote about this in The Men Who Stare At Goats.
I was thinking the same thing as I was writing it :).
Yves Smith over at NakedCapitalism had a good take on the Men Who Stare At Goats: that the whole thing was a psyop to distract from the real horrific shit they were up to.
I have to say I was disappointed at the film adaptation with George Clooney. It had its moments.
Georgie-boy strikes again :D
I saw an interview with O'Neill a few years ago on Joe Rogan when the book came out. Fascinating story about the writing of that book and what he found. The conspiracies never end in this country.
Outstanding piece with really insightful points about the nature of conspiracies and the people who forge them.
I'd like to think my blurting out a Cross quote the other day had some small part in its creation, but I suspect you were going to watch Chinatown for the nth time and write this regardless of my movie quote Tourette's haha
Also, great use of synecdoche and Grand Guignol in the same article. I'm jealous.
Actually, it may have done. For some reason a few days ago I all the sudden had the urge to watch Chinatown again and it smacked me in the face how it's one of the great conspiracy movies. As I wrote, it's not an easy film to watch. Huston is so damned good it makes me grateful he was an artist and not a power hungry oligarch. With his powers he might've taken over the world.
To be completely candid, the more I read about the world today, from the protected elites frequenting Esptein Island to the web of corruption in the Biden Crime Family, I fear that people like Noah Cross have indeed taken over the world. Hell, at least Huston had a certain gravitas, unlike these disgusting reprobates!
It's all that fiat money floating around that's created this class of unaccountable, insanely corrupt filth. They don't build anything, they don't fix anything and yet they keep piling more money into their "investments" and offshore accounts.
It will all come down at some point and when it does all their "riches" and power will be shown for what they are: smoke and mirrors.
I'll drink to that!
Nicholson was arguably at one time the greatest of our cinema actors. He had far to fall.
Now do Arthur Penn's THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1975) with Nicholson and Brando.
"There's one left."
"I doubt it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAugXNctWuU
Holy sheee-it! I've never seen this film. That clip was fantastic. Will check it out for sure.
Brando is fantastic too. Did you ever see Reflections in a Golden Eye? It's a very disturbing film with Brando and Liz Taylor about an officer on a southern military base and his wife. Based on a book by Carson McCullers. There are two versions -- one in a gold hazy print and the other in full color -- which I've never seen done before. The gold hazy print is somehow more disturbing but the color one is prettier and still upsetting enough. It's not a masterpiece, but definitely worth a watch and directed by John Huston so you can't go too far wrong.
We gotta talk about Huston's WISE BLOOD with Brad Dourif some time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9JSCaWzF-k
Oh fuck no. I don't go near Flannery O'Connor anymore. My wife loves her writing. I think she's brilliant but so fucking dark. It's strange that I found Wise Blood harder to watch than Chinatown. Perhaps it's because Chinatown is so beautifully shot that it makes the horror easier to view. Wise Blood has that faded 1970s poor, down and out American desperation thing going on that leaves me so entirely hopeless I want to shoot myself. Dourif is amazing as always and Harry Dean Stanton as well. But no. I don't have many hard lines but this is one. You can talk to my wife about it, she loves it. :)
It was just pointed out to me that I have such a hard time with O'Connor's work because her characters' motivations are so much harder to understand. It's just so chaotic and terrifying. I mean, say what you want about Noah Cross, and he is a monster, at least we can get some sense of why he does what he does.
*she would have been a good woman if there'd of been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.*
Doesn't "the Misfit" say that before he kills the old witch? I kind of liked that guy.
You know your O'Connor. Encountering that evil unexpectedly got me thinking on that other question.
It never got dark enough for either me or Huston, who seems to have had a personal obsession with adapting some of the 20th century's bleakest literary masterpieces to film.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088322/
Heh, my wife just watched that one a few weeks ago. Perhaps you're an actual artist like Huston or my wife. Real artists want to perceive it all to the depths, and can handle it, even like it there.
I'm just a dumb drummer from the Bronx who likes dogs and the occasional joint.
The warned live long.
Chinatown has been my all-time favorite movie since I saw it at college in 1974.
One thing the comments don't mention here is the amazingly atmospheric soundtrack.
And the repartee:
Yelburton: My goodness, what happened to your nose?
Jake Gittes: I cut myself shaving.
Yelburton: You ought to be more careful. That must really smart.
Jake Gittes: Only when I breathe.