promiseland: gentle hackery

Look, we all know I'm not a writer.

What I chase are impulses.  The impulses in this case are, well, all the dumb hollywood trivia I've been stockpiling since 2007.  Because I wasn't a filmbro before Atlanta.  Not really.  I had a tiny VHS collection, for fucksake.  I didn't memorize directors or actors or anecdotes about flix.  Movies weren't that big a part of my life: they weren't "part" of my mind much at all.

So, in the spirit of crucial advice I received from an old art partner, I'm "writing out my education"-- purging the tanks, flushing all the acquired (& likely erroneous, largely anecdotal) associated bilge.  All the satanic panic stuff that was going on in the b/g of my childhood, as AIDS burned its way into the pain & pleasure associations of a society which refused to accept sexual liberation for women & queerfolk...  All the post-'Nam, soured hippy drek that formed the basis for my parents' tastes in movies as I was growing up...  That's what this thing is being built from.

Some of it is true.  Some of it is blarney.  A lot of it is instinct.  Structurally, that's where the instinct is most at play.  Since realizing that this project isn't like PAINLESS, or AZURE PANTRY, or DENIZEN (inasmuch as PROMISELAND isn't as fixated on historical truths as emotional ones) I've been trying to make sense of the stew it has become:  there's a vast cast of real names up front, playing bit parts, but only a couple of those "actors" or parts are there for any real purpose beyond my weirdly specific aesthetics.

Like, why do I need Vincent Price in this?  Because he was Dennis Hopper's friend in real life?  Or because he was an art collector, and got Dennis Hopper into art collecting as an investment strategy?  Or because Vincent Price is, was, shall always be, a walking talking symbol of where Queer meets Cinema?  Vincent Price is camp as a boy scout jamboree, and about half as scary.

This sort of bullshit has been building in my head for a long time.  Long before I settled on Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell as the main characters in this offroad-movie about Amer-arcana.  For the last five years I've been pretty fixated on Val Lewton & Curtis Harrington & Donald Cammell & Marjorie Cameron & the fact that Jack Parsons blew himself up bootlegging nitroglycerin for the film industry, after he was blackballed from gov't work for being the kind of screwball who fucked too much & too publicly for the squares funding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Like, Satanic Panic was this dumb dumb dumb meme that meant exactly one thing to xtian fundamentalism, when I was a kid...  But I don't believe it was exclusively projection from a bunch of deeply neurotic, sexually repressed eschatologists.  I think there was something of the return of the repressed actually at play in & around Hollywoodland, and it had disguised itself in discordant, bizarre, clangorous drag.  Sometimes it was called a UFO.  Sometimes it was called Free Love.  Sometimes it was called in the dead of night from a payphone on the strip, and the breathing we heard from the other end of the line was labored with phlegm & tears.

Of course the Mansonoids had something to do with it:  the mansonoids emerged from beneath the semen-crused fringes of our national subconscious.  They were products of the Process Church as much as the Scientologists, as much products of The Family as a twisted-up, paranoid, frustrated hippy substrate of an America which knew the nuclear family was less than ten minutes from midnight.  But Manson himself was a cheap little no-talent hustler, a drug dealer & pimp out to revenge himself on the arts & recording industry, using stupid, abandoned kids.  Manson was a nothing, a null, a nobody.  Manson wasn't important the way the movies were important; he knew it & he resented it.  Manson was little better than a walk-on.  He wasn't a speaking part.  I mean, have you heard him talk?

No, this story has never been about Manson.  PROMISELAND is about the dumb teenage runaway who, decades after James Dean had been & gone, decided to live in the desert & obsessively edit his own little epic about how people confuse film with fact; while Dennis Hopper was binging on cocaine & booze & fucking around trying to get Jodorowsky to bless 'The Last Movie', he felt compelled to interview Manson.  He was dressing & living as close to the Mansonoid standard as he felt comfortable, for a few years, clearly out of his tree on a diet of speed, getting his ego spoonfed by groupies & hangers-on.  But how did Dennis Hoppper, the bright young new face, arrive precisely there?

How could Dennis Hopper see the word PIGS in blood on Polanski's door and conclude, "Manson understands me"?

That's what this story is supposed to be about:  how did Dennis Hopper go so wrong?  How did he wind up being Billy, the lame-o sidekick in 'Easy Rider', the hairy burnout clearly not in control of himself or his filmmaking?  By having the wrong friends, seems like the obvious answer.  By inserting himself into the Wrong Narrative.

Which of course inspires the question:  What's the correct narrative? 

Well.  There isn't one.

[looks around]

Is there?