Damn the Man! Edition, part I

(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on November 8th, 2007, in a slightly different form. To put it in context, the administration had recently installed an assload of security cameras around campus, including some outside residential areas, without consulting the students; naturally that inspired a lot of controversy.)

As I stepped out of my apartment on Monday morning, I was confronted with Guy Fawkes-related graffiti winding along the Alumni Village sidewalk, admonishing me to “remember, remember the 5th of November.” (Oh dear. It seems I had forgotten.) On closer inspection, it actually had more to do with V for Vendetta, considering the stylized V scrawled on a manhole cover and the simplified anti-authoritarian slogans like “Do not conform!” that I would have found terribly empowering when I was about 13.

I did see V for Vendetta over the summer. It wasn’t nearly as much of a disappointment as I’d thought it would be, though naturally I thought the graphic novel was better; being a big Hollywood movie, they amped up the crowd-pleasing action and cleaned up, toned down, or entirely cut some of the darker or more risqué elements from the source, like a detective’s use of LSD in an attempt to get inside V’s head and a Night Porter-esque fascist-themed cabaret number. Still, I did enjoy it overall, though you know what really pissed me off? The fact that V’s relationship to Evie, which was that of a father figure in the book, was gradually transformed into that of a boyfriend. I’ll concede that there’s definitely something hot about a mysterious, well-spoken, well-dressed man who knows about art, history, literature, etc.—but it’s V, for fuck’s sake! He wouldn’t have a girlfriend! Can you imagine it?: some chick painting her toenails on the rim of a bathtub in the secret V lair, her hair tucked into a shower cap as she waits for the bleach of her retouched skunk streaks to kick in, shouting, “You weren’t really out blowing up the Old Bailey, you were with that floozy again, weren’tcha?! I swear, you go on and on about Guy Fawkes Day and ya can’t even remember our anniversary!”

Misogyny aside, the aim of that chalk graffiti was clearly to protest Purchase’s increasingly strict security measures of late: “Down with the Purchase police state!” read one slogan, since washed away by rain. I’m hardly a fan myself of those ubiquitous oily black hemispheres clandestinely gawping at you from various ceilings and walls like big dilated toads’ eyes; security cameras were also present throughout the halls of my Midwestern high school, although they went largely unquestioned due to Columbine. This week’s Film Vault, part one of two, brings you some anti-establishment, institution-subverting films that are a bit more under-the-radar and less slogan-inspiring than anything involving the Wachowski brothers.


Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

There’s more to German cinema than History Channel clips of Hitler shouting about things, Uwe Boll’s craptacular video game adaptations, and Killer Condom. Director Werner Herzog made a name for himself depicting unconventional, eccentric, or flat-out crazy protagonists in generally losing struggles with some greater force, such as nature or society; he’s probably best known for his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, though popular audiences would be more familiar with later films like Grizzly Man and this year’s Rescue Dawn.

Even Dwarfs Started Small is one of Herzog’s earliest films and one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot. We’re talking Holy Mountain levels of bizarre. Set in an alternate universe populated entirely by little people, Dwarfs centers around an isolated, unspecified institution—a jail? a school? an insane asylum?—in which the inmates proceed to run amok. They tear down a palm tree, look at porn mags of big people, hotwire a car and leave it running in a circle for the rest of the film, light potted plants on fire with gasoline, murder a pig while others examine a collection of pinned insects wearing wedding costumes, watch a camel shitting, and crucify a monkey, all while speaking German punctuated with demonic high-pitched laughter. Two dwarves, apparently blind, wear blacked-out industrial goggles and must feel their way around with big sticks, which they often just end up whacking things with. Some chickens—an animal Herzog seems oddly obsessed with—live on the premises, one running around with a dead mouse clutched in its beak, another pecking at the remains of a dead hen. Throughout all this, one of the “instructors,” also a dwarf, has locked himself up in his office where he waits in vain for the police, openly mocked by the inmates outdoors and the laughter of one insurgent he has tied to an office chair; eventually he, too, succumbs to madness.

As you might imagine, it’s a pretty polarizing sort of film. Crispin Glover apparently loves it, and I thought it had moments of brilliance, but I can see how people might hate it: there’s no real plot to speak of beyond the basic premise of grotesquely fascinating incidents in a rebellion against authority.

One of the dwarves was injured a couple of times during the shoot, and as Herzog describes in the terrific documentary short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (in which he does just that as the fulfillment of a bet), he promised to jump into a cactus patch if they all stayed out of trouble until filming ended. Even as he explains that some of the cactus needles are still inside his knee years later, he claims with an odd smile that “it’s not self-destructive to jump into a cactus.” This is the same man who, at age 63, was shot with an air rifle during an interview and wanted to continue because “it was not a significant bullet.” If that’s not badass I don’t know what is.