everything happens twice
by Douglas Messerli
Guy
Maddin and George Toles (writers), Guy Maddin (director) Brand upon the Brain! / 2006
Since
the mid-1980s Canadian director Guy Maddin has been conjuring up
low-budget-expense and high-budget-concept films that combine surrealist-like
images, outsider stories, and amateur actors to create films that tower over
most Hollywood productions. For Maddin film history is not something to be
studied but a treasure to be exploited, used time and again in his own celluloid
fantasies. Early works of the silent films, of the horror genre, and exploitive
sexual flicks marry sophisticated comedies and psychological documentaries in
Maddin’s oeuvre, nearly always creating something arresting and fresh.
His 2006 mockumentary Brand upon the Brain! tells the horrific tale of a figure, also
named Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown/Erik Steffen), who after growing up and
abandoning his childhood island-home, Black Notch, is called back 30 years
later by his monstrous, yet still beloved Mother (Gretchen Krich/Cathleen O’Malley/Susan
Corzette) in order to repaint the lighthouse home in which he was raised. As
the older Maddin whitewashes his strange “home,” so he imagines he is covering
over the wretched past; but, in fact, in attempting to paint it over, he calls
it up for himself and his audience, revealing a series of psychologically
tortuous childhood experiences that, in 12 chapters of fractured flashbacks,
serve as almost a catalogue of cinematically conceived boyhood terrors. Both
Mother and Father (Todd Moore/Clayton Corzette), who run their lighthouse home
as a home for orphans within which they also raise their two children, Guy and
Sis (Maya Lawson), are involved in something clearly sinister. Although Mother
is doting and loving—often to the point of a pederastic-like fondling of her
son—she also regularly rages against the two children and her orphan charges,
demanding their complete celibacy and sexual non-differentiation. With the help
of a telescope atop the lighthouse she spies on their outdoor activities, while
trumpeting her love and rage through an “aerophone,” a radio/loudspeaker contraption
invented by Guy’s Father.
One day, the famed serial movie star,
detective/harp-playing Wendy Hale shows up on the otherwise empty island,
immediately creating a bond with both Guy and Sis in order to help her solve
the secret to their parents’ nefarious activities and to explain why the island
children have holes bored into the backs of their heads. Guy falls in love with
the beautiful Wendy, while Wendy quickly falls in love with Sis, determining to
disguise herself into her twin detective brother, Chance in order to get closer
to Sis.
Between strange nightly processionals of
the orphans, up and down the metal, spiral staircase to Guy’s Father’s
laboratory, the periodic transformations of Mother from a middle-aged harridan
to a young beauty, and the secret plotting and ritualistic meetings of the
orphans led by their eldest member, Savage Tom (Andrew Loviska), Sis and
Chance/Wendy establish a near-sexual relationship, while the lonely Guy,
missing his beloved Wendy, develops a “boy crush” on Chance. Thus does Maddin,
the director, establishe a near lunatic story involving nearly every subject
forbidden for filmmakers in the decades prior to his film: lesbianism, homosexuality,
pederasty, cannibalism (Savage Tom seeks to serve up the heart of the poor
orphan Neddie [Kellan Larson]), and medical experimentation on children—the
last revealed when Chance discovers that Father is harvesting a nectar from the
children which provides his wife and others with a temporarily restoral of
youth.
Everything ends badly as Sis kills Father;
Mother restores him, like Frankenstein, to life; formerly victimized orphans
return on a rowboat, killing Father; Mother, desperate for nectar, is
discovered devouring little Neddie; Sis and Chance/Wendy, now married, force
Mother and Savage Tom from the island; and, finally, Guy is sent away in foster
care. Is it any wonder that grown-up, Guy, in his attempt to whitewash his horrific
past, appears sad and depressed as he now wanders Black Notch still in search
of his fleeting love? The return of the elderly Mother, merely rekindles some
of the horror he has suffered. She dies, furious with her son’s inattention—at
the moment of her death he is distracted by his fantasy of Wendy—and he is left
alone, caught between his memories and a vague future that promises nothing but
emptiness.
The “brand” imposed upon his brain, a mark
or indelible lesson, is, obviously, the madness of his childhood, a time in
which everything has been inverted and perverted in relation to what most might
describe as “normality.” If nothing else, every figure with whom he has been
connected has self-destructed. Even his Sis, the ghost of Wendy reports, grew
evil, continuing her parent’s experiments with the orphans; when Chance/Wendy
left her, she circled the lighthouse lamp like a moth, combusting in her rage over
her lover’s flight.
But the brand Maddin suggests by his
title is also a kind of lens through which he (the director) has come to see
the world, a kind of “product,” the hokey grade-B horror and adventure stories
he has grown up with, helping him—in the most positive sense—to pervert his
vision of bland notions of normality.
In early showings of this film around the
world, Maddin presented the mostly silent images accompanied by a live
orchestra, Foley artists (sound artist, recreating the film’s sound effects),
and an “interlocutor” or narrator (in the released CD, spoken by Isabella
Rossellini), a role performed by various figures, including Crispin Glover,
Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, John Ashbery, and Maddin himself—transforming the
whole into a grand theatrical event that might make an impression on anyone entering
the dark territory (with flickers of Poe, the Frankenstein story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hardy Boy tales, images of Dali and
Buñuel, and hundreds of other such works) projects onto our consciousnesses,
actualizing the film’s unresolved truism: “everything happens twice.”
Los Angeles,
December 29, 2014
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