Hysteria Lanes

Back when DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES first made its appearance, I persisted in mixing it up with SUBURBAN MADNESS. When the show started I kept wondering where Sela Ward was, and when Eva Longoria was going to try and entice her husband back to the bed chamber via a latex get up.

Clarity has finally arrived in the form of DVDs for both DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES and SUBURBAN MADNESS. They do happen to share numerous similarities. Both are set in the Post-Spielbergian world of corrupted cookie cutter suburban houses, little boxes on a hill side, though SM's abodes are nouveau riche tract houses while DH's are cut from Ward Cleaver's cloth. Both have an emphasis on sexual want and cheating spouses. DM is set in Friendswood, Texas, and DH in Fairview, Unknown. If the world of SUBURBAN MADNESS is chintzier and ultimately sadder than that of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, both still reflect an up to date GOOD HOUSEKEEPING moral compass. And both shows, it turns out, are based on real cases.

SUBURBAN MADNESS (Columbia Tristar [now Sony], 2003, $24.95, Tuesday, April 5, 2004) is at root a docu-drama about the case of Clara Harris (played here by Elizabeth Pena), a Texas wife who ran over her husband three times, for which she received the modest sum of 20 years in the slammer. Based on a story in TEXAS MONTHLY, SUB MAD recounts what led to this rash act, backtracking from the auto assault to its roots in Harris's picture perfect marriage to a dentist (Brett Cullen, also cut out of the same cookie mode as the hunks in DH).

Clara, an Hispanic former beauty queen, is the partner and brains behind her husband's chain of dental clinics. She fries up the bacon, brings it home from the store. When a recently divorced blonde begs her way into his employ, he ends up having an affair with her. Hubby is eventually found out and confesses, and Clara is instructed, through a coffee klatch of women she eavesdrops on at the local Starbucks, in the wiles of losing weight, dressing sexier, and seducing her husband all over again. But he lapses. The problem is not with her lack of a leather teddy, but with her. Clara eventually hires a private detective to follow him, and confronting the duo as they are about to enter their hotel room for sex, she ends up driving over her husband and killing him, with malice aforethought, her step-daughter screaming in the passenger seat beside her.

Clara, it turns out, doesn't have any friends, a situation far different from that of the Housewives. This also leads to a deficit in plot. Therefore, no one counsels her against going to the manhating macho PI played by a miscast Sela Ward, who exists, in the TV movie anyway, to flesh out the other half of the movie. She is cynical. Believes that all men cheat. She has also driven her current husband and daughters crazy with her suspiciousness. I haven't read the TEXAS MONTHLY piece so I don't know if the Sela Ward character, Bobbi Bacha, is part of the cast or made up for the movie, but her function, besides padding, out the story with a complex "web of life" story line about crossing infidelities, is clearly to offer "balance" in the reporting on the outcome of dubiousness. She is an unpleasant character, though a type you might see in real life, and ultimately she is proven to be "wrong" to Clara's provisional "right."

SUBURBAN MADNESS though proves, in the end, to be surprisingly sympathetic to the cheating husband, though not without criticism of him. He's not as bright as his wife, he is devoted to his daughter, he has tried to make the marriage work, but Clara is a bit too controlling and by the time she tries to backtrack from her own inclinations it is too late. What the film fails to account for is tracking how Clara got from efficient doctor to murderer. I'm sure it can happen, but her crumbing into a harridan isn't clocked adequately, perhaps because the film spends so much time leaping over to Bacha and her various confusing cases.

Sony's disc is a barebones affair, with a somewhat ragged looking 1.78:1 transfer (enhanced) and DD 5.1 in English and English and French subtitles. The silent static menu offers 12-chapter scene selection, and extras consist of trailers for ART HEIST, FACE OF TERROR, TROIS: THE ESCORT, BOOGEYMAN, and THE BROOKE ELLISON STORY.

Despite its freshly scrubbed face and lightly perfumed aroma, DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (Touchstone, 2004-2005, six discs, $59.95, Tuesday, September 20, 2005) is basically the same thing, only without the ballsy detective. Not that there aren't detectives in the series. It is basically a mystery — why did Joe Gillis-style narrator Mary Alice Young (the wonderful Brenda Strong, with the most pleasing voice in show biz) kill herself — except that the girl detectives on the case are distracted by a number of real world issues: Susan (Teri Hatcher) by the mysterious new plumber who has moved in across the street, Lynette (Felicity Huffman) by the ravages of four kids, Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) by the affair she is having with her teenage gardener, and Bree (Marcia Cross) by the affairs of her husband, who turns out to be a masochist (not unlike characters in other shows, such as SIX FEET UNDER) who seeks out pain from the neighborhood call girl (Sharon Lawrence). The show was also loosely inspired by a real crime case, that of Andrea Yates, which the creator was discussing one day with his mother.

Susan appears to be the main character but the one in whom creator Marc Cherry has invested most of his emotion and understanding is Bree, whom he says on the disc set is based on his mother. As the season unfolds, Bree moves from being a Stepford mom to the most put upon woman of the bunch, with a betraying husband who doesn't understand her and two awful kids. Politics aren't explicit in the show itself (though Cherry is proud to announce his prudish Republican allegiances) but Bree is a member of the NRA and is clearly a Republican mom, whom Cherry lovingly lavishes both humor and dignity.

A blend of drama and black humor that draws upon such cultural antecedents as SEX IN THE CITY, AMERICAN BEAUTY, and the work of David Lynch, DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES is a good show and the six disc account of its first season is a prestigious celebration of the show. Outside of the first season of THE SHIELD, it's one of the best TV season sets I've yet encountered.

Each disc has at least four episodes (there are 23 in all), in excellent widescreen transfers (1.78:1, enhanced), with Dolby Digital 5.1 and English subtitles. Each disc has a "play all" option and there is usually one episode picked out for presentation with a deleted scene or two put back in, with a video into by Cherry.

Each disc has some kind of supplement. Disc No. 1 has a deleted scene, with optional Cherry yak, and a featurette called "A Stroll Down Wisteria Lane," in which a TV Face asks Cherry often offensive questions and tries to tease out clues about season two. The first disc also has trailers for FLIGHTPLAN, DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES's second season, ALIAS: FOURTH SEASON SCRUBS: 2ND SEASON, and LOST. The biggest supplement is Cherry's solo audio commentary for the pilot, where he comes off as very possessive and critical.

Disc No. 2 has a throwaway feature called "DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES Around the World" which shows how the series is dubbed in different languages, plus two deleted scenes. There is also an audio commentary with Cherry director Larry Shaw over the ep called "Guilty." Cherry is a little less critical when someone else is sitting there next to him.

Disc No. 3, which covers episodes 9 through 12 has only the modest deleted scenes, a fuller version of a scene in the episode "Suspicious Minds" set at a fund raising fashion show, and the very informative featurette "Dressing Wisteria Lane." Disc No. 4 (episodes 13-16), has two deleted scenes and an audio commentary track from Cherry and Shaw again. Disc No. 5 (episodes 17-20) has a deleted scene, plus "The Ladies' Favorite Scenes," in which the five main cast members (including Nicollette Sheridan) provide commentaries over their favorite moments). Finally disc No. 6 (episodes 21-23) is packed, with "Oprah Winfrey Is The New Neighbor," a kind of promotional film that imagines Winfrey moving onto Wisteria Lane, a deleted scene, a commentary track with Cherry Shaw on "One Wonderful Day," "Bloopers From the Set," "Secrets of Wisteria Lane," which gives the merest hints as to what will unfold in season 2, "Behind the Scenes of Desperate Housewives," and two extended episodes with new scenes and a Cherry intro.

It's interesting to think about DH in relation to the other big ABC series introduced at the same time and which has captured the imagination of the nation: LOST. Both are about enclosed societies (everyone lives on the same "street") whose inhabitants harbor gross secrets, who fight among themselves, who cope with sexual jelousy and deprivation (Gabrielle losing her furniture is the equivalent of all the 815 passengers losing their possessions, futures, lives). Like SURVIVOR, LOST is about facing nature in the raw, testing one's resolve. DH is about facing society in the raw, with only a thin veneer of "civility" protecting its denizens from primitivism. DH is like the parody of Fire Island found in Edmund White's first novel, FORGETTING ELENA, an essay on the multitudenous rules of behavior that strangle people, be it a gay enclave or the court of Louis XIV.

When I as in high school the president of the student body for a year was Clark H., who happened to be gay. He was a fellow from one of the prominent families and Marc Cherry very much resembles him in appearance and demeanor. H. was very popular and I think that in part people liked him in defiance of the bullies. He had the charm of Cherry, quickly picking up facial expressions and mannerisms that would sweep through the student body, just as Cherry adopts common mannerisms of TV faces, sitcom actors, and comedians. I recall a forum in which H. was introducing juniors to school government and started off with, "My speech is going to be like a bikini: it's only going to cover the essentials," a lead off geared to get a laugh out of the mostly heterosexual (and of course mostly moronic) students, but employing a heterosexual configuration not to "pass" so much as to relate. In his post high school career he would often show up at gatherings of students, and occasionally whisk a few away to show them the gay bars downtown, or pass around copies of his gay pornography, magazines that showed Tom of Finland looking guys giving themselves blowjobs. The last I heard of him was through reports a few years out of high school in which H. had been shattered by the break up of a romance and had slipped into drink and pills, like some wretch from THE BOYS IN THE BAND. But though I have no idea where he is now I'm sure that he quickly rallied and became an executive, an entrepreneur, or the head of the Log Cabin Republicans somewhere.

H. was a "character." Most of us are characters, but H. seemed to have cast himself, or been cast by fate, in the role of a character, a quasi-joke, a comedian, a clown, someone we didn't have to worry about having depth. Cherry very much reminds me of H.; sardonic, catty, fussy, a little smug, very conservative while yet being part of a minority not conventionally served by the Republican party. Both obviously ambitious, yet fragile. Both managed to succeed in spite of self-isolating personal traits and politics. In Cherry's case he's managed to make one of the best shows on TV, one that celebrates the quirkiness of women while all around it prime time shows made by presumably heterosexual men essentially ignore women unless they can be Fox foxes (though Wisteria Lane women never eat too much and never watch soaps). I don't think that I would relish being around him personally, just as Clark H. could be a real bore with his proselytizing and acerbic put downs, and Cherry, at least on the evidence of his yak tracks, is one of those Hollywood guys who gets really exercised by negative reviews in the papers. But I don't have to. I can enjoy the show, which portrays Cherry's best side, the creative side. He is a "character" who has created great characters.

I already reviewed MINDHUNTERS (Dimension, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, September 20, 2005) the movie when it first came out. Here I will concentrate on MINDHUNTERS the DVD experience.

Director Harlin usually provides informed, calm, interesting audio tracks regardless what one may think of his movies (I tend to like them) and this one is no exception. He reveals that the film was shot mostly in Holland, pretending to be the coast of the American south, and that some of the interiors were shot in an abandoned hotel in Amsterdam. These were of course cost saving schemes. Harlin is frank about the fact that the movie was really made a long time ago, and also reveals that the original score was not up to his needs, and that a new score was conjured up in a matter of days.

One of the most interesting topics he brings up, but without going into detail about it, or exploring the implications, is the encroachment of digital imagery into films. He acknowledges that a lot of what one sees in MINDHUNTERS is faked, footage created digitally in a bank of computers he set up in the production office. However, he doesn't explore the meaning of this shift in cinema. Personally, I'm beginning to view it as a false issue. Throughout cinema's history there has been a face off between those who admire its theatrical (i.e., artificial) nature, and those who savor its ability to capture reality (or the "redemption of physical reality," as Krakaur called it). But even in a documentary, events have to be edited, selected, highlighted, and so forth, to state the obvious. All cinema, in the end, is "fake," or it is incomprehensible. What I like about cinema is its ability to make me feel a certain reality but through its artificiality.

The movie casts a blend of newcomers and old hands (Kilmer and Slater essentially make cameos), and Harlin is customarily generous with his praise of everyone (but has anyone done a contemporaneous track bitching about unruly cast members?).

Besides the audio track (and a few trailers), the supplements include "Profiling MINDHUNTERS," which is a lengthy making of, a feature about a stunt sequence, and "A Director's Walk Through Crimetown," in which Harlin surveys the main set of the film, which is an old naval base turned into an FBI training camp. These are good, solid supplements that will, sadly, only appeal to those who actually liked the film, a small club of which I am a member.

The widescreen transfer is excellent and the film also comes with Dolby Digital 5.1 in both English and French, plus English captions and Spanish subtitles. The animated, musical menu offers 24-chapter scene selection.

At the same time, Dimension also releases SCARY MOVIE 3, as SCARY MOVIE 3.5 (Dimension, 2003, $19.95, Tuesday, September 20, 2005). To the best of my research, the film is a single minute longer (although that can be a lot) and one of the new moments has Pam Anderson saying to Jenny McCarthy that Jenny envies her shaved pussy, just before holding up one of those Chinese cats with no hair.

This is the SCARY MOVIE that mocks SIGNS, 8 MILE, THE MATRIX, and THE RING. I was kinda bored watching it again, but when I got to the end I started to laugh again, and some of the deleted scenes also made me chuckle.

Most of the supplements ("Making SCARY MOVIE 3," "Making SCARY MOVIE 3 For Real," "Outtakes and Bloopers," "Hulk vs. Aliens: Behind the Scenes of the Alternate Ending") are from the first version of the disc, which Dimension released on May 11th in 2004. I actually couldn't tell if the commentary track was new or old. It could be both, but the fact that they are discussing the restored "dirty" moments makes me think that this is a new track. Among the old things is a long, 10-minute alternate ending, which includes a satire on THE MATRIX.

There are about nine deleted scenes left over from the first disc, plus a handful of new ones that include "Baby Oil Spill," "Office Chase" (which has the heroine fleeing a villain), "Ferry"(which has more RING satire), "Boarding up the House, " and "Annie in the Kitchen" which additional material between Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen. Finally, there is a bunch of trailers, including MINDHUNTERS, HELLRAISER HELLWORLD/HELLRAISER: DEADER, THE PROPHECY, DRACULA III: LEGACY, and WICKED PRAYER, and the animated, musical menu offers 18-chapter scene selection.

Despite such a high profile production as SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, with its big stars and publicity push, and which played at festivals and even mainstream theaters in America, Canadian director Guy Maddin remains a resolute outsider artist. More in line with what Maddin does is COWARDS BEND THE KNEE (Zeitgeist, 2003, $29.95, Tuesday, September 20, 2005), and the director is now working on a companion piece to this film, called BRAND ON THE BRAIN!, which will no doubt further affirm him as the preeminent non-commercial director of our time.

Conceived some time in the early 2000s, COWARDS is technically the film element from an installation partially funded by the Canadian government and hosted at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, and later at the Maddin-friendly Rotterdam Film Festival. COWARDS is in 10 chapters, and the set up in the gallery had patrons viewing each of the chapters through portmanteau kinescopes. The script, which contains scenes either not shot or not included in the final edit, is contained in a very hard to get book published in 2003 by The Power Plant, which also includes an interview with the director.

The kinescope form of theatrical presentation finds Maddin digging back even further into cinema's roots. The director has always favored an antique look to his films, and none but TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS looks like it was made any later than 1921. His evident influences are the editing style of Soviet constructivist filmmaking and the emotional hysteria of silent filmmakers such as Von Stroheim and actors such as Lon Chaney, and most of his films are half-talkies, mostly silent with music and some dialogue, placing him in that delicious moment of transition between silent and sound eras. The kinescope made what later became a public act — watching a movie with a public, like a play — an intensely private, silent, solitary act made even more like a peephole onto forbidden images by the hunched posture the viewer of ancient times had to adopt.

Maddin has said that COWARDS is his most autobiographical film, and the peephole form of display must have made the effect of making the film like that of becoming a voyeur into one's own life. But with its typically maddening Maddinist visual obfuscation, the film doesn't seem particularly autobiographical, despite the fact that the main character is yclept Guy Maddin. But this is the Maddin template. I would hazard to guess that all of his films are autobiographical (as how can they not be), but that his sense of humor, the primitive moviemaking machinery he has or chooses to work with, and natural cinematic aesthetic inclinations push him toward outrageous surface content that, perhaps intentionally, disguises how personal the films really are.

The plot concerns one Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr), a hockey player with the Winnipeg Maroons, who are on the brink of crowning a championship season. His girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart), however, reveals that she is pregnant, and Maddin takes care of this distraction by escorting her to The Black Silhouette, a beauty parlor where abortions can be had in a back room. But even as the doctor performs the soon-lethal procedure on Veronica, Maddin sees and instantly falls for Meta (Melissa Dionisio). Maddin ends up working at the salon, where he is pestered by the ghost of Veronica, haunted by other failings, and driven by Meta to perform an act of murder for her: kill the man who killed her father, but using her dead father's actual hands, the blue, dead appendages attached to Maddin's arms by the mysterious Dr. Fusi (Louis Negin).

COWARDS actually has a complex narrative but it is presented in an elliptical style, with the scatter shot editing style that Maddin has adopted of late, one that combines slow motion, repetition of images, freeze frames, and a generally hectic ambience. There are two primary settings, the ice rink and environs, and the salon, but each is shot (on 8mm) with a rapidity and single-lamp-illuminated intensity that almost masks more than it shows, and the film also makes forays into such areas as a hockey team's locker room and a wax museum of hockey players who turn out to be real men fleeing the confines of domesticity. The film is a logjam of Maddin imagery: hands, eyes, ice, hair, food, blood, pestilence, and primitive emotions such as fear, lust, and sexual competitiveness, in this case between a father and son.

This is autobiographical or personal filmmaking at an extreme edge because it is unlikely that a viewer who knows nothing about Maddin will fully grasp its humor, intricacies, and privileged moments. On the surface it is barely compressible, like the nonsense verse of Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery, highly subjective and personal behind its screen of incoherence or playfulness. But Maddin doesn't care. Oh, I am sure that at some high level Maddin does want to communicate with others through his art. But resists, or has resisted thus far, the temptations to engage in conventional storytelling, or to adopt a bourgeois surface sheen. He is a rebel and a primitivist who has refused to go any other way but his own.

For those as enamored of Maddin's presentations as I am, the DVD of the otherwise difficult to see COWARDS BEND THE KNEE is a treasure trove of materials. Unlike other "difficult," obscure, or personal directors such as, say Peter Greenaway, Maddin is not obfuscatory or contemptuous in his public musings, and the audio commentary track on this disc is helpful in getting the basic layout of the story and straightening out the autobiographical elements from the fantasias of an alternate life. Maddin is an engaging, self-deprecating speaker with an unusually interesting vocabulary, and makes for a fine host throughout the short film. Also on hand is a four-minute series of excerpts or takes or auditions from the unfinished and now basically lost homoerotic film he was making in 1997 called, here anyway, LOVE-CHAUNT OF THE CHIMNEY, originally inspired from several stories by Herman Melville. This is followed by a preview of sorts of his next film, BRAND ON THE BRAIN!, which Maddin filmed in Seattle early this year at the invitation of an entity called The Film Company. It's not a trailer, it's not a making of, but in its brevity (8:47) it is a portrait of the artist in middle age, combining color footage of the shoot, images from the movie, and narration by Maddin. It's on the disc because, as mentioned earlier, Maddin views it as a companion piece to COWARDS, i.e., that it has autobiographic elements as well, though just as well-disguised. Finally, there is a set of photo galleries, called "Hair and Hockey." "Lil's" is a set of 17 images from Maddin's collection, showing the beauty salon operated by his aunt and mother that he and his family lived above when he was a kid. Some of the images were used to inspire set design for COWARDS. "Maroons" has six nostalgic images of the Canadian team Maddin's father managed. Like many a famous American movie director, Maddin pere was blind in one eye (blindness as a theme runs through his films and as an affliction through his family). "Production" has 15 images, some in color, of the film in progress. In addition there is an eight-page insert that gives cast and credits, bios of 11 of the film's characters, chapter titles, an unfilmed chapter from the script, the artist's statement (a convention of art galleries in case you didn't know), and "A Note on Hands" by Maddin.

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in October (fingers crossed) on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, September 28th, at 9 AM.

COMING SOON:DEAD AND BREAKFAST, RED EYE and FLIGHTPLAN, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!

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