by Douglas Messerli
Guy Maddin and George Toles (screenplay), Guy
Maddin (director) Keyhole / 2011, US general release 2012
After
an intense shootout, a group of hoodlums regroups within the living room of an
old house, trying to determine which of their members are dead. The living are
asked to line up against the wall facing out, the dead should face in, demands
the group’s temporary leader, Big Ed (David Enright). The “dead” are forced to
leave the house, where the police will surely gather them and send them to the
morgue. So begins the seemingly zany mash-up of the gangster movie, the haunted
house horror film, and a metaphysical speculation by Canadian filmmaker Guy
Maddin.
And from this scene on we enter a strange
surrealist-like world where ghosts mingle with the living, sometimes even while
they are engaged in sex, and figures, like Calypso (Louis Negin) and Ulysses
(Jason Patric) are intertwined with other cartoon-like figures such as Johnny
Chang and the forever masturbating-Yazie playing Brucie, Ulysses’ now-dead son.
And for a few moments, before Ulysses finally shows up carrying the body of
nearly-dead woman named Denny (Brooke Palsson), we almost feel that this
cacophony of genres and character types will result in nothing but a campy
pastiche. Yet anyone who has seen a Maddin movie, knows that the director is
absolutely brilliant in his ability to juggle various opposing elements,
weaving them ultimately into a kind pattern that Penelope herself might have
envied.
Ulysses’ wife, however, is here called
Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), and it is her love and the home life with his
three boys, Ned, Brucie, and Manners (the latter of whom the gangsters and
captured, tied up and bound) that this Ulysses has returned to claim. In order
to recover that past, he is forced to go through the house, room by room,
gradually calling up through ghostly visions, the other-worldly emanations of
Denny, and a recharging jolt from the electric chair created by his son
Manners, a figure he pulls with him throughout journey through the house.
In Greek myth, Hyacinth was a beautiful
young male, beloved by Apollo, who, when playing discus was killed when the
jealous Zephyr blew the stone into Hyacinth’s body. Loved also by the Thracian
singer Thamyris, Hyacinth also represented one of the first examples of
homosexuality in Greek mythological story-telling. But in Maddin’s mythology,
Hyacinth is simply a beautifully sorrowful flower with her father, Calypso,
chained to her bed, and her current lover Johnny Chang controlling her every
move. Since her children and husband have all been killed off, she has few
alternatives and is clearly bitter about her situation—although she also is fascinated
and frightened by the possibility that Ulysses may somehow be able to reach her
room.
As looney as it sometimes seems, Maddin’s
tale is a kind of Proustian story in which Ulysses orders in interior
decorators to return the haunted house into the beautiful home it had once
been, at that same time he, room by room, attempts to remember the whole of his
past life. With the help of the drowned Denny, his son Manners, who once loved
Denny, and the jolt of electricity, he gradually reclaims time, and with
Manners’ help puts everything back in its precise spot, freeing Calypso (whose
bonds Hyacinth has already severed) and Hyacinth at the same moment he destroys
Chang. And, if at first, the film may have seemed dense and incomprehensible,
it gradually, scene by scene, begins to make narrative sense. If, in his
lifetime, Ulysses has ignored, squandered, and destroyed his near perfect home life,
by Keyhole’s end, most of his gangster friends have been eliminated, and
he and his family returned to their former lives. Time past has not only
restored but reclaimed.
But, of course, we know it’s only in
fiction and film—expressions of the imagination—that such things actually
happen, and, in that sense, Maddin’s movie becomes a sort of rumination of the
restorative power of film itself. If gangster and horror films dole out the
bloody dead, so too can cinema retake its past, unrolling that pattern, like
the Penelope of Homer’s myth, weaving and unweaving a pattern of life and death
until it again becomes a blank space on which to reinvent history. Through the
keyhole a Ulysses may only be able to glimpse fragments of the life once lived,
but by opening the doors to every room he can finally cleanse the haunted house
of its ghosts.
Los Angeles, April 19,
2014
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