burning up
Don Levy (screenplay and director, based on an idea by Levy and Alan Daiches) Herostratus / 1967
Although this film certainly does have a narrative, it would seem almost
pointless to talk about plot. The film begins with a handsome young man on the
run (Michael Gothard as Max) and ends with a similar scene, Levy's structure
being, a bit like Hitchcock's Vertigo,
circular. It is as if Max were living out his terrors as in a nightmare, never
able to escape the endless pattern of disgust and desire.
Dressed throughout the film in white, Max is for most of the work, a
kind of virgin hippie, a man whom he himself describes as being at the bottom
of the scrap heap. His dreary little room, its walls covered with newspapers
and other ephemera, a doll hanging by its neck on rope, parallels his own inner
state, a kind of empty rebellion that cannot seem to reach expression—much like
the angry young men of Britain's late 1950s and the later drugged out hippies of
both England and the US of the decade when this film was made. He is, in part,
trapped by the social extremes of the age—extreme wealth and painful poverty—controlled
by large institutions who use erotically laden psychological effects to sell
their goods (even the orange latex gloves attached to the film's model, Helen
Mirren) to the populace at large.
His anger is best expressed by Levy through Max's mad ax-swinging
revenge on his landlady as he maniacally destroys his own habitat. Yet he is
unsuccessful even at that. He is, simply put, a failure at everything. Presuming himself to be a poet he writes absurd love
poems while never having engaged in sex. As his nearby tenant, Sandy (Mona Chin),
observes he is unwilling even to express his own mind, to chance engagement with
the universe. The advertising executive Farson puts it best: he has created
nothing, done nothing, been nothing. In short, he is no thing but an agent of
the world in which he lives.
Max is burning up inside, perhaps, but puts nothing to fire in the
world. With ax in hand, rather, he visits the offices of Farson, proposing a
bold idea to gain himself attention: he will offer the rights to his own death,
a suicide by jumping from a high building. The very fact that Farson actually
considers this proposal reveals the extremes to which he and his society are
willing to go to make money, his readiness to sell life itself, a theme repeated throughout Levy's film through
highly artificed, somewhat surreal images of overdressed models and, in
particular, scenes of a dancing stripper spliced together with images of the
slaughterhouse, the carcasses of dead animals juxtaposed against the body of a
living temptress: meat against meet. Even Farson's cold-hearted secretary-lover,
Clio (Gabriella Licudi), wants nothing to do with Max's proposal, but
nonetheless, is enticed into the project by sexually rewarding Max a final
dinner and his first sexual encounter with a woman.
The "accidental murder" sends Max—representing a kind of
tragic mix of James Dean and Malcolm McDowell—on the run once more; but this
time we know that he has no place to go, that the run will lead only into
homelessness and death. The actor who played Max, Gothard, himself committed
suicide in 1992, at the age of 53.
Los
Angeles, March 29, 2012
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