Damn the Man! Edition, part II

(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on November 15th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)

Last week’s Film Vault was part one in a series of two regarding lesser-known anti-authoritarian films, spurred by Purchase’s increasingly and worryingly strict security measures. In that column, I mentioned the V for Vendetta-related graffiti I’d seen outside my apartment on Guy Fawkes Day; well, the day that column came out, I left my apartment and soon came upon another sidewalk-chalk message, saying "Thank you!" to me and the Indy, and simply signed with a V in a circle. It was pretty amusing, albeit kind of stalkerish. On to the movies!


The Ruling Class (1972)

I first became aware of this film around age 15, when sleazy occult-camp industrial act My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult was my favorite band. They’re known for heavily sampling obscure cult and horror films in their music and some of their best-known samples, regarding “the high-voltage messiah” and “the AC-DC god,” came from this movie. For years I only knew of it, vaguely, as some movie about crazy people who think they’re deities, but I didn’t actually see it for myself until about a year ago.

It quickly became one of my all-time favorite films. It’s two and a half hours long, but doesn’t feel its length. I paid $35 for the single-disc Criterion DVD and it was worth every cent. Peter O’Toole was nominated for an Oscar for his leading role as a schizophrenic aristocrat—a role the Academy wouldn’t touch nowadays, as he isn’t redeemed through love of a child or something—yet I’ve only met two people* who have ever seen The Ruling Class, much less even heard of it, without my having shown it to them.

The Ruling Class is essentially an absurdist dark comedy set in an upper-crust Britain largely untarnished by the ‘60s counterculture. It was initially given an X rating in the UK for its overt criticism of the Church and the class system (anyone looking for another reason for that rating will be disappointed as there’s maybe one brief shot of a woman’s bare ass).

When the 13th Earl of Gurney accidentally kills himself during a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation while wearing a military jacket and tutu, his insane son, Jack, is set to inherit his estate, a fact resented by Jack’s uncle, who attempts to get him re-committed. Jack believes himself to be God, advocating love and charity between napping on a big crucifix and initiating most of the film’s random musical numbers. An attempt to “cure” him by exposing him to another madman with a messiah complex only changes the nature of his madness: he’s still insane, and far more destructively so, recasting himself as a smartly-dressed Jack the Ripper figure, but nobody suspects a thing even after he commits a murder because his insanity has taken on a more respectable front.

On first viewing, I was tempted for awhile to see Jack’s insanity as simply misunderstood eccentricity, but the film refuses to hold such a simplistic notion and proves that he is, in fact, batshit crazy. This still doesn’t make the greedy members of his extended family any more sympathetic: between those who want to cure him and those who want him locked up in a madhouse, everyone has their own self-serving agenda, except perhaps for the scene-stealing drunken Marxist butler who stays on in the household despite his substantial inheritance in order to crack jokes at the aristocracy’s expense.

I’m really surprised the blatant satire and rampant absurdism of The Ruling Class haven’t made it a more widely-known cult classic. Any film in which a madman with a Jesus Christ pose grapples with a guy in a gorilla suit really deserves to be.

*--Both of them, I must admit, were young men I had a strong interest in at the time . . . and have since stopped speaking to. Boys who know film will always break your heart, it seems, but I could never force myself to fall for a guy who unironically thinks Dude, Where's My Car? or, I don't know, Big Momma's House is great cinema.


Zardoz (1974)

Have you ever wanted to watch Sean Connery grunting around in a ponytail and bright orange loincloth? No? Well, tell that to the creators of Zardoz, an exercise in how to be pretentious on a budget.

That sense is apparent from the largely-unnecessary first scene, in which a floating man’s head with a painted-on goatee warns the viewer against immortality and acknowledges his status as a fictional character by mentioning that he was created for your amusement: “Is God in show business, too?” (My, how postmodern and thought-provoking!)

It seems “Zardoz” is the name given to a giant, flying stone head that serves as deity to the “Exterminators,” including Sean Connery and his ample chest hair as Zed; these men are given free reign to rape and murder the farming class in order to control the population. Zardoz spits guns out of its mouth—the camera noticeably shakes when struck by some airborne rifles—and imparts words of wisdom to the Exterminators: “The gun is good. The penis is evil.”

Zed stows away inside Zardoz, accidentally killing the man from the first scene and ending up in the Vortex, a New Agey pastoral commune, where he is studied by a group of psychic, leisurely immortals kept alive by a sentient and all-knowing Tabernacle. The immortals have gradually grown impotent due to their inability to procreate: in one amusing sequence, they show Zed footage of women mudwrestling in an attempt to induce a hard-on.

Within the Vortex are a couple of outsider communities. There are the Apathetics, who have become catatonic from sheer ennui; they are later rejuvenated by touching Zed’s sweat, as they surround him, moaning, and begin freely banging one another. Then there are the Renegades, who have been permanently aged as punishment for any minor infraction of the Vortex’s strict status quo—one guy is aged five years for having mean thoughts—and left to shuffle around in a retirement community that resembles a dowdy perennial New Year’s Eve party; they end up running amok through the Vortex, longing for Zed to bring them death.

Zed is discovered to be some sort of genius, although you wouldn’t know it from Connery’s stilted delivery and few expressions beyond stony and bewildered. His bestial, unrestrained nature inspires the lust of many Vortex women, including the one who rallies for his death, who ends up (groan) falling in love with him and leading to a laughably unbelievable, idealistic conclusion.

This film intends to express a Big Important Message against class hierarchy and the “intellectual elite,” championing the Human Experience and “pure emotion,” but it has so much to say and with such underlying earnestness—and a lot of that message is frankly pretty conventional—that it largely comes across as ridiculous. Still, there are some moments of pure audacity that are almost admirable: how often do you see a bunch of tuxedoed senior citizens begging a half-naked man to kill them?