Cinema Canada (Oct-Nov 1974)

Monkeys in the Attic A movie critic hates to be caught with the wrong expression on his face when the lights go up. Have I taken this movie too seriously, or not seriously enough? That I didn’t laugh — at all — is that because I was being too earnest, writing notes in the dark, trying to grasp the film? The croaks and chuckles of amusement around me — were they the responses of appropriately attuned sensibilities, relaxing to the rhythms of this freaked-out fantasia, rocking to and fro with its abrupt shifts and discontinuities, its bizarre juxtapositions of tone? In finding the film funny, pretty continuously funny, were they reacting spasmodically to a series of spasms, or were they responding to a coherent comic vision of experience that spoke to their condition? Monkeys in the Attic: one night in a house inhabited by four people. Two of them, Wanda and Eric, are spaced out; one of them, Elaine, is freaking out; the fourth, Frederick, is angry, bewildered, alternately bullying Elaine, appealing to her, and trying to control her. Nothing in the movie suggests that the characters have any existence outside it. They have no history, no palpable connections with a social milieu. No account is offered of what they do, who they are, why they live together, or how they acquired such expensive furniture. They are creatures of the imaginations of Morley Markson and John Palmer, conjured up to perform in a fantasia. Elaine’s is the central consciousness. Wanda and Eric clown, grimace, cavort, and chase each other in antic sexuality (Eric persistently puncturing their games, bringing Wanda down from her whimsies, a recurring symbolic coitus interruptus). Elaine wanders through the house looking distraught and hysterical, gulping Courvoisier and pills, and the film repeatedly renders her inner experience (never anyone else’s) as a maddening, terrorizing nightmare, in which Wanda and Eric oppress her with their surrealistic freakishness, their acting-out of psychic anarchy, and Frederick oppresses her with his domineering, Super-Egotistical hostility. Frederick claims to love her and to be concerned about her, but the pattern of his behaviour contradicts this claim — a classic schizogenic manoeuvre. Let’s drive Elaine crazy? Or does Elaine only experience their behaviour as a conspiracy to torment her because 68 Cinema Canada FILIYI REVIEWS she is already crazy? Are Wanda and Eric quite happily doing their own zany thing, radically liberated from conventional consciousness? Or are they, too (especially Wanda) on the verge of hysterical collapse, distracted from distraction by distraction? Elaine furiously accuses Wanda of “acting all the time _.. being a crazy fool’, to which Wanda responds with a burst of anguish. Certainly, to this viewer, anguish and desperation seemed to be the propulsion behind most of the frantic goings-on. And I remember Morley’s earlier film, Zero the Fool, in which three tense and anxious people were propelled into spasms of hysteria by a fourth person — Morley himself, behind the camera. In that movie the cinematic mode was B & W cinéma vérité, catchas-much-as-you-can-while-it’s-going-on. There were scenes of all-too-real pain, as the participants (I won’t say ‘actors’) begged Morley, the demonic enchanter, to release them, to turn off the X-ray machine. The suffering was wrenched out in authentic displays of anguish on real faces. In Monkeys there is a different kind of contrivance. Instead of extorting the overflow of craziness from real people (in a travesty of encounter therapy) and then recording it, he gets his actors to imitate craziness, in a crazy environment, crazily photographed. The camera is constantly peering up stairwells, leering into mirrors, coming at people around corners, from above, below, between. Angles shift and reel, light glares, fades, shimmers. The dissolve is the essential linking device in the film’s repertoire; shots blend and blur; disparate events and moments in time are Jess Walton made to interpenetrate and overlap, breaking down the solidity of fact into the fluidity of impressions. The subjectivity of vision established in this way seems to coincide more or less with Elaine’s psychic turmoil. But, as a mode of presentation, it encompasses scenes and actions which have no connection with her. Only the scenes involving Frederick are exempt from this stylization. With what seems like a deliberate consistency, Frederick is shown with a distance and objectivity that match the unsympathetic harshness of his emotional presence. And beyond this cinematic hothousing, so different from Zero the Fool, there is the attempt, equally different, to render hysteria from the inside. By certain conventional cinematic signs we are asked to receive considerable portions of this bizarre concoction as representing Elaine’s half-doped blend of memory, dream and fantasy. Water cascades over Niagara Falls, the figures of the other three characters loom and writhe and make menacing speeches at her, and cries and whispers echo in the gloom. Occasionally the characters speak to each other in what seem like the accents of ‘normal’ consciousness. From such moments a perspective is fleetingly established from which to get a fix on the more eccentric behaviour. But the acting in such moments is crudely unconvincing, and the hint of genuine and coherent emotional lives thoroughly implausible. For the ‘world’ conjured up by Markson and Palmer (remember that long night-in-a-madhouse play of Palmer’s, The End?) has no connection with any of the modes in which life is actually experienced. Nobody’s life ever looked like the circus created in Monkeys, or (more important, since I’m not insisting on any narrow criterion of ‘realism’) ever felt like it from the inside either. In other words, the movie doesn’t hold a mirror up to human experience, however distorting, from whatever angle, but reflects only itself. Its mirrors — the film is full of mirrors — only bounce: back and forth reflections of a self-contained, and hence arbitrary, hence irrelevant, craziness. Most of the people at the screening I attended found it funny, i.e. they made sounds expressive of amusement. But I ask again, as I did at the beginning, were they laughing at what came to them as a comic vision of life, or only at a series