The Face Knife

William Burroughs - The Western Lands
The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that’s where Ren came in.

Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, Light. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out … depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense-but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk’s body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands.

Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains.

The use of source music in the Sopranos has never been particularly good; the producers of the show seem to have suspect taste or maybe it just doesn’t match mine. I normally wouldn’t bother to talk about it at all but the sixth and ultimate season of the show starting off with the voice of Bill Burroughs giving a guide to the shadowlands of Northern Jersey was incredibly shocking.

One of Burrough’s mantras is that “all agents defect and all resistors sell out” and it might be the first part of that statement that has the most bearing on this episode. The only successful Burroughs adaptation that I can think of, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is kind of like that principle applied to Casablanca.

In his review of “Members Only”, Matt Zoller Seitz (Film critic for the New York Press (among other outlets for his writing)) writes that he believes that part of David Chase’s project (if it indeed really makes sense to imply an architect for a TV series with multiple writers and directors (not even going so far as to say that sometimes the performances of the leads really supercede the writing - add a depth to the stories that we’re there on the page, which too often devolves into game playing (cf first line from this episode, crap episodes like “Christopher,” etc.))) is that Chase always believes that his characters, when faced with a moral dilemna, will always take the easy way out - the easy way being the most expedient, venal or profitable course of action. Chase has made a point to establish his debt to Bunuel, who had a similar view of humanity, but instead of embracing and even loving his characters faults, as I believe Bunuel to have done (I realize my view of Bunuel may be idiosyncratic, but I actual tend to lump him in with Bresson and Renoir in this way) Chase’s unrelenting savagery (to borrow an invective (or compliment, depending on your POV) often thrown at Bunuel) points to an unredeemable universe, a moral void that sucks like a chest wound.

I’m not saying that it would be necessary for the writers of the series to have us embrace and understand Tony’s faults - that would border on sociopathy. But it seems there is nowhere to go but more bleakness. This may actually be a consequence of one of the things I find most admirable about the writing on the Sopranos - the way the characters become more and more like themselves as time goes by. You won’t find any epiphanies, life changes or “character arcs” in the Sopranos. It’s a perfect example of what I believe in this proper mode for tragedy, and what I like to call the “you can’t unfry things” school of writing¹. After a career of making unforgivable pictures with a worldview as jaundiced as that of Chase, Todd Solondz really nailed the humanistic version of “you can’t unfry things” in the unfairly maligned (and Bunuel inspired) Palindromes. Maybe Tony can be “born again” in a way that recognizes his inherently corrupt nature but doesn’t discount it, but the way the writing crew has handled ’sympathetic’ characters such as Furio and Bobby does not give me great confidence.

¹After a very, very funny episode of Strangers with Candy in which Chuck Noblett (Stephen Colbert) says to Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) “Sorry won’t make these onion rings golden brown. You can’t unfry things! You can’t change who you are!”

There’s nothing more disreputable than fundamentalism, even when the infallible holy text to which the devotee pays obeisance is the Word of a half-crazy* anarcho-libertarian with a severe design sense and a warped sense of humor. The literal, humorless** fidelity of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) to Frank Miller’s comic books somehow manages to warp to the parodic sentimentality and brutality of the source to such an extent that they’re no longer parodic - they’re bathetic. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the take-away of Sin City (the film) is that, as two of the protagonists say, there’s some things decent people*** weren’t meant to see, but they’re necessary in the pursuit of justice. That’s a fascist message, even if we, the audience, are implicated in the category of not-decent people since we’re watching the carnage on screen and presumably getting a kick out of it.

It may be too much to expect a responsible politico-moral stance from the Rodriguez/Tarantino axis. The early films of Tarantino were dismissed as being reprehensibly violent but at least they coupled that violence with a knowing, ironic distance****. Kill Bill and Sin City are all about KICKS, but the former is not as irresponsible as the latter because the former’s mission of vigilante justice is altogether personal, while the vigilantes of Sin City are a reaction to the amoral WORLD of Noir (and presumably, early 21st century America). It’s a political statement even if it’s unwitting, even if the point of the film was to be about the art.

Which, I have to say, is pretty good. It could have been better, as Rodriguez is not a great director, but the effects were marvelous. I have no problem with the movie itself; my problem is with the project, and it’s hard to take a moral stand against something without coming off as Bill Bennett. But although my lifestyle and tastes would most likely be considered as degenerate by much of the U.S., I feel like I have to object to the mainstreaming of the ethos that lead, not altogether hyperbolically, to Abu Ghraib and the idea that being Right is license to do anything in the pursuit of justice. Sure, the protagonists of Sin City are psychologically sick but they’re be more or less normal in the context of contemporary political discourse, and the further normalization of the anti-rule-of-law position without explicit (or even much implicit) condemnation is an unwise project.
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In addition to the faithful reproductions of comic book panels, there’s another interesting kind of reproductive dialogue going on here, with Sin City being shot on digital, produced digitally, distributed digitally and (when I saw it, though obviously not widespread yet) digitally projected. Someone want to go Benjamin on this?

* though not as comic creators seem to go
** the movie itself, however, can be funny
*** in the film, all women
****though this creeping Tarantinoism was the bane of 90s cinema just as creeping Fincherism is turning out to be the bane of the 00s.