The movie is filled with cultural references, from Rossetti at the beginning108 to the pompous, soon to be shut up with a bullet Dr. Soberin at the end.
Dr. Soberin: As the world becomes more primitive, its treasures become more fabulous.
The latter sequence is particularly choice, as Soberin rattles off his culture markers and Lilly, doubling Mike (a point we shall return to), childishly, or barbarically, stubbornly (another key point) ignores his insinuations and insists on knowing—not literary or mythical references, but what’s in the box.
Dr. Soberin: Curiosity killed a cat and it certainly would have you if you’d followed your impulse to open it. You did very well to call me when you did.
Lily: Yes, I know. But what’s in it?
Dr. Soberin: You have been misnamed, Gabrielle [Lily’s real name, also the actress’s name, misnames her?]. You should have been called Pandora. She had a curiosity about a box and opened it and let loose all the evil in the world.
Lily: Never mind about the evil. What’s in it?
Dr. Soberin: Did you ever hear of Lot’s wife?
Lily: No. [WTF never heard of Lot’s wife?]
Dr. Soberin: No. Well, she was told not to look back. But she disobeyed and she was changed into a pillar of salt.
Lily: Well, I just want to know what it is.
Dr. Soberin: The head of Medusa. That’s what’s in the box, and who looks on her will be changed not into stone but into brimstone and ashes. But of course you wouldn’t believe me; you’d have to see for yourself, wouldn’t you?
Perhaps it’s her Damian meets Lolita eroticism, but the filmmakers are again subverted, as the audience is definitely on Lily’s side as she shuts up Soberin—poimanently, ya see?—and opens the damned box.109 Though not before Soberin delivers his peroration:
Dr. Soberin: Listen to me, as if I were Cerberus barking with all his heads at the gates of hell. [What, she didn’t get Lot’s wife and she’ll get this?] I will tell you where to take it, but don’t . . . don’t open the box!110
Even the film’s Voice of Reason111 is equally pompous and fragmented—decadent, if you will. When Pat finally tells Mike what’s up, he speaks slowly, as if talking to a dense child, but still can’t really put it together himself, and mumbling disconnected words he hopes will ring a bell with no further effort on his world-weary part:
Lt. Pat Murphy: Now listen, Mike. Listen carefully. I’m going to pronounce a few words. They’re harmless words. Just a bunch of letters scrambled together.112 But their meaning is very important. Try to understand what they mean. “Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity.”113
But anyway, rather than a cultured protagonist, the Lovecraftian note here is carried by the presentation of a cultural wasteland, where culture exists only a scattering of dying embers, tossed around without much or any understanding by the Last Men (perhaps, given what happens when the box is opened, literally Last Men).114 It’s the world Lovecraft believed himself to be condemned to live in, not his (imaginary) Regency past.
That landscape, physically, in terms of shooting locations, is Los Angeles, today (as of 1955). Surely that can’t be Lovecraftian? Just so, precisely its absence of human culture makes LA the perfect Lovecraftian location. The nighttime scenes are all polished chrome glaring like boiling acid under blinding neon and fluorescent lights (like the box’s contents) while the daytime scenes seem to be filled with grey dust under a pitiless sun that just went nova (foreshadowing the effects of the box’s light).115
More importantly, perhaps, many of the exteriors were shot in the Bunker Hill section (an appropriately New English name, don’t you think?) and thus have a more typically Lovecraftian touch of old, ruined neighborhoods. Indeed, shortly after the film was made the whole area was flattened for an “urban renewal” project, making the film, ironically, something of an archeological record of a now long-vanished, once “modern” area.116
And even more importantly, Aldrich, perhaps to show that Mike is “crooked” or “screwed up,” decided to use a number of odd camera angles, not only, say, on the stairs of Lily’s flophouse but even the presumably modern and normal hospital Mike awakens in early in the film.
As St. Armand notes:
So many of these skewed structures which we find in Lovecraft . . . with their gambrel roofs and rotten timbers and rooms tilted at crazy or obtuse angles, are, of course, psychic allegories of decadent and tumbled-down minds, twisted to exquisite and picturesque degrees of insanity. . . . Here the dreamland which . . . populates modern Boston with ghouls and living gargoyles is no longer an antiquarian fancy but rather immediately beneath the cellar door or around the nearest corner.117
Then, there’s the violence; sure that’s un-Lovecraft? No one in Lovecraft’s world goes about gathering information like Mike does. He has two methods: if he sees you as a member of the white collar class, a coroner or health club concierge, he’ll peel off some cash to offer what he considers a fair price; should you refuse, or hold out for more, that’s when the finger-breaking starts.
Otherwise, he just jumps right in like a skinhead at a mosh pit, and you’re lucky if he finds it more amusing to snap your rare Caruso 78 in half rather than your spine.118
Admittedly, this thuggish kind of violence is quite out of Lovecraft’s line—breaking fingers in drawers, dropping a jacked-up car on a hapless sidekick and the like—although remember, he did like Robert Howard’s Conan. More to the point, however, is that the filmmakers have taken a page from the horror genre and realized that it’s often more effective—and less likely to get you into trouble with the censors—and even perhaps more cinematically fun to imply, not show.119
Thus, when Christina is tortured to death with some kind of metal-crimping device, we only see her legs squirming as we hear her shrieks. Actually, the shrieks continue after they stop spasming, which is perhaps a mistake but certainly emphasizes the illusory, make-believe nature what we’re seeing;120 it also suggests the kind of torturous results of the warping of the space/time continuum Lovecraft’s protagonists tend to fall into. Again, we don’t see Nick being crushed beneath the car, nor anything but his arm afterwards.
And in a famous sequence, Mike dispatches a goon by some kind of movie-land “martial arts” trick; it’s shot from below, so we don’t see what he does (Vulcan deathgrip?) and the camera then lingers on Jack Elam’s wonderfully creepy face as he emotes sheer terror/confusion over what he’s seen. Later, his boss is compelled to wonderingly ask Mike “What’d you do to him, anyway? You scared Charlie half to death,” rather like any number of doomed Lovecraftian protagonists.
As the movie nears the end, we see more and more—perhaps the need to keep the pace accelerating prevented Aldrich from using any tricky shots?—such as breaking the coroner’s fingers and bitch-slapping the health club concierge, and, of course, Lily’s iconic immolation, which we’ll devote some space to soon. This is consistent with the notion of the horror tale revealing more and more as the climax approaches. And of course, you can’t blame them for not showing the local, or possibly global, effects of the suitcase; ten years later even Dr. Strangelove only used stock footage of mushroom clouds.
But—but—but—What about the sex? Surely that’s not in Lovecraft. Well, indeed, women are pretty hard to find in Lovecraft, and the only sexual congress seems to be with extra-dimensional monsters (e.g., “The Dunwich Horror”).121 In the same way, the only sex we find in KMD is implied by the blackmail set-ups Mike sends Velda on. For a supposed swinging bachelor, Mike gets laid about as much as SNL’s Czechoslovakian Brothers. Like the violence, it’s all in the implications.
The Feds tell us he’s a “bedroom dick” (he settles divorce cases through blackmail) and that while Velda handles the men, he handles the women, but we never see or hear of any, and that’s just business anyway. Christina starts off on his bad side by making him wreck his sports car, and she’s soon dead anyway; the mob boss’s sister, a drunk nympho, throws herself on him, but he o
nly uses her to get into the house, then dumps her (“Here’s to friendship” is as far as she gets), while he recognizes Lily is a crazy nymphet not to be touched.
Altogether, Mike, like Lovecraft, is a he-man woman-hater that probably agrees with one of the goons: “Women are worse than flies.”
Speaking of Lily: played with Satanic, screen-melting intensity by Gaby Rogers,122 she’s a sort of multi-doppelganger. The doomed Christina, nekkid and running barefoot, is the classic movie woman in distress, yet is nevertheless rather masculine, with her short hair and trench coat, the first of many sexually antipathetic roles that Cloris “Frau Blucher” Leachman would play. Lily easily takes over her role (Lily to Christina’s Rossetti obsession)—while pretending to be Christina’s roommate—as Mike’s guide to the underworld (in both senses); when they meet she’s also (presumably) nekkid, under a robe this time, and barefoot; when next they meet she’s be running and screaming like Christina as well. Eventually, Velda will supply her with the nifty black/white Chanel suit that neatly emphasizes her duplicitous nature.123
Her trench coat makes her a double for the standard private dick.124 Her fatal colloquy with Soberin shows her fully in the private dick mode, demanding to know and see.
This girl/boy/woman is not an easy person to live with, as Dr. Soberin and Mike discover. She is, as played by ex-European Gaby Rogers, née Rosenberg (another atomic caper resulting in death by fire), the ultimate Jamesian American Girl:
Daisy Miller’s freedom in the face of European social conventions is of a kind that would make her insufferable in any civilized society. . . . She is utterly uneducated, and no intelligent man could stand her for long since there could be no possible exchange of speech with her; she has nothing to recommend her but looks, money, confidence and clothes.125
Gaby has looks and confidence, and clothes courtesy of Velda; when Soberin threatens to cut her out on the money, she responds by pulling out something Leavis and James—and Soberin—didn’t count on: the private dick’s best friend, a roscoe,126 with predicable—and unpredictable—results.
The mythical elements here are pretty deep or widespread. When, near the beginning of the film, the thug with the pliers asks the jerkass we will come to know near the end as Dr. Soberin whether the now-dead Christina should be tortured some more, Soberin makes some typically pompous and leadenly “amusing” remarks about “that would be resurrection from the dead.” When Mike, who should have died in the car with Christina, is somehow rescued and wakes up in the hospital, he is said to be “back from the dead.” Lily Carver comes back from the dead in the person of Gaby, Mike not knowing till the end that the Feds fished the real Lily out of the river days ago.
Lily/Gaby, Christina’s roommate, thus resurrects both Lily by pretense and Christina by becoming Mike’s new naked in a trench coat partner. Confronting his double, Lily/Gaby at the end is like the confrontation of Lovecraft’s “Outsider”127 with his mirror image in the eponymous story—Hoberman calls him “a walking corpse”128 while Pat the Fed already dismissed him in the third person with “Let him go to hell”—and Mike falls dead (with some help from Gaby’s roscoe, of course).
This is Gaby’s final resurrection, the true resurrection—not the ridiculous reanimated corpse (as Alan Watts called it) of the exoteric Christian (Mike, the “walking corpse” brought “back from the dead”) but St. Paul’s Gnostic idea of the Body of Light, with all its parallels in every esoteric tradition.129
The pedantic Soberin—too sober to grasp such super-subtle ideas, unlike the “feline” intuition of Gaby—has been doubly routed. Gaby has answered his question from the beginning of the film—“How do you bring back the dead?”—and proven that she is indeed not “misnamed,” for she has revealed herself not as subhuman—“feline”130—but superhuman, a being of light, an angel—Gabriel.131
“Hip” film critics love to talk about how Gaby “subverts” the detective genre, and especially the Mike Hammer character—this time, girl shoots boy.132 Despite the filmmakers, I think what’s actually happening here is that Gaby is redeeming the Mike character. While even the Feds grudgingly admit Mike “can sniff out information like nobody I ever saw” his search for what Velda mocks as “the Great Whatzit” is really motivated by greed, when he suspects the box must be valuable to someone. Gaby’s insistence on knowing what’s in the box, by contrast, is childish but sincere—she only kills Soberin when he reneges on sharing the proceeds, after the long back and forth about Medusa and Co.133
But how can Mike be redeemed? The filmmakers, as I’ve noted, want to push the Good Liberal notion of “shut up and trust the government” and so portray Mike as “stubborn” and Gaby as subhuman (Soberin condescends with “You have the feline perceptions that all women have”) rather than inquisitive.
Wesley Addy as Pat the Fed delivers the filmmakers’ contemptuous epitaph – “You’re sooo smaaaart”—with his trademark WASP condescension. He’s kind of a wimpy Al Gore, dealing with a “climate denier” or Ross Perot or George W.; Hoberman say it’s “as though addressing a dumb animal” (as Soberin does Gaby).
But is it fair? Noted Lovecraftian Darrell Schweitzer has come to the defense of the “imbecility of [the typical Lovecraft] protagonist”:
The critic has probably read [“Dreams in the Witch House”] either in a fantasy magazine or a collection of Lovecraft stories. . . . Walter Gilman, on the other hand, is supposed to be living in the “real” world where things like [anthropomorphic rat familiars] are beyond the range of normal experience. Gilman knows that they are impossible. The human mind is a stubborn thing [like Mike!], and when it is convinced of something, it isn’t always dissuaded by mere proof. . . . He does what any normal, sane person would do. . . . Unless all heroes are occult detectives we cannot expect them to readily accept the fact that the laws of existence have been violated.134
Mike isn’t “stupid” so much as he’s in over his head. As I’ve pointed out before, Lovecraft’s protagonists aren’t stupid or gullible, but almost always all-too educated, like Dr. Soberin, thus inclined to know, as Schweitzer says, what is and isn’t the case, which is exactly what leads them to their doom.135
Thus Lovecraft’s protagonists are unlike the “occult detectives” once popular in the Victorian age—such as Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence or William Hope Hodgson’s Carnaki, or most famously, Stoker’s Van Helsing.136 They are not calm, wise experts easily unmasking fake mediums or calling upon some handy bit of mystical folklore to save the day.137
However learned conventionally or mystically, they quickly find themselves in too far, asking one question too many.138 As Lovecraft famously said:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.—“The Call of Cthulhu”
Kiss Me Deadly has been described as the ultimate noir film, summarizing the conventions of the genre and then breaking new ground.139 Hoberman sees this as happening all through the ’50s, as if some kind of atomic mutation had taken place:
Genres collide in the great Hollywood movies of the mid-fifties cold-war thaw. . . . The western goes south in The Searchers; the cartoon merges with the musical in The Girl Can’t Help It. Science fiction becomes pop sociology in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And noir veers into apocalyptic sci-fi in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly, which, briefly described, tracks one of the sleaziest, stupidest, most brutal detectives in American movies through a nocturnal, inexplicably violent labyrinth to a white-hot vision of cosmic annihilation.—“The Thriller
of Tomorrow”
Note the Lovecraftian language uses. “Veering into apocalyptic sci-fi” would be a perfect description of Lovecraft’s own evolution in the thirties, from horror in the Weird Tales style to long, “scientifictional” novellas. Perhaps Lovecraft’s achievement could be described as taking the three original genres bequeathed to him by his master, Poe—detective, science fiction, and post-Gothic horror—and creating a kind of mash-up more suitable for modern circumstances. To do so, he had to downplay the detective’s infallible and cool logic (as Poe’s Dupin or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock), so as to trigger the horrific end, while using science—or “science”—to provide a comforting illusion of normality, against which the horror stands our more “inexplicably.”
Kiss Me Deadly strikes the Lovecraftian note because, inadvertently, it arises from the same post-war cultural chaos that would retrospectively root itself in Lovecraft’s Synthesis, producing such characteristically modern noir-horror-sci-fi works as Alien, Blade Runner, and The Matrix.
It’s no surprise that the French loved it; as Hoberman notes:
In France, Kiss Me Deadly was admired mainly by the young critics at Cahiers du cinéma, where it was considered “the thriller of tomorrow” and Aldrich, dubbed Le gros Bob, was hailed as “the first director of the atomic age.”
Claude Chabrol praised the film in rather Poe-esque terms:
Kiss Me Deadly, Claude Chabrol wrote in his passionate review, “has chosen to create itself out of the worst material to be found, the most deplorable, the most nauseous product of a genre in a state of putrefaction: a Mickey Spillane story.” Aldrich and Bezzerides “have taken this threadbare and lackluster fabric and splendidly rewoven it into rich patterns of the most enigmatic arabesques.”140
The Eldritch Evola & Others Page 7
