Point Blank (1967)
I wasn’t prepared for this one. It’s an art film masquerading as film noir (shot in Technicolor). I was distracted by one irritating aspect of John Boorman’s sensibility. (He directed Deliverance, after all.) The content of this film is so incredibly macho — so misogynist — it made me feel like an uninvited guest at an stag party. However the form of the film is quite the opposite. It has a diffuse artiness that flirts, flits and dawdles over the images in an almost masturbatory way. Yes, it’s very sexual, but that’s because it’s all about power. (I just wish the power wasn’t all in the hands of the men.) Sharon Acker -- Marvin's wife and his buddy John Vernon's sexbuddy -- appears briefly and muses: “How good it must be, being dead…….is it?” and promptly commits suicide. The only other women in this movie are Angie Dickinson and a fat woman at a cocktail party who says “Lunches, dinners — I’m getting as fat as a pig.” I’ve never understood the appeal of Angie Dickinson — of course she’s sexy, but so what? To call the violence in Point Blank gratuitous would be an understatement, men are constantly overpowering other men. I often forget straight men are so obsessed with dominating each other. It seems to me to be about internalized homophobia, but I’m prejudiced. Why can’t they just leave that other big guy alone? Why do they always have to kill him or torture him? Here it’s about money; Lee Marvin wants the $93,000, now. In one pretty unforgettable scene he takes Michael Strong for a drive in a new car and proceeds to crash it into telephone poles and bridge abutments. Why doesn’t Marvin just punch him out? But no, Marvin is so macho he has to wreck a car. Later Marvin throws a nude John Vernon off a building. It’s the touch of sexuality — of naked humiliation — that I find a disturbingly erotic. There are three gay characters in the film. Marvin makes two guys tie themselves up together — one of them is obviously effeminate. And later Marvin is watching a movie on TV (I looked it up — the scene is from a movie called The Cobweb, with John Kerr -- who played the conflicted young homosexual in Tea and Sympathy. In the clip Kerr speaks of getting over his “neurotic inertia.” What could be gayer than that?). I know it sounds like I’m creating something out of nothing here, and I probably am, but to me when men dominate other men it’s kinda sick if it’s not just a sexual game. One of my favourite — but again nutty — moments? When Angie Dickinson gets so angry with Lee Marvin she flails at him, with her fists, her purse, her body. He just stands there and takes it. (Never has one image made it so clear that men are nightmarishly stronger than women.) Finally she collapses on the floor in an exhausted heap, and he turns on the TV. Another favourite moment - demonstrating Boorman’s ‘arty’ side — is when Marvin and Dickinson start making love. They keep rolling sideways, towards the camera, and after the first roll, Lee Marvin is having sex with Sharon Acker, and then they roll again, and it’s John Vernon having sex with Sharon Acker. Well it’s the 60s after all — but what a startling and eloquent visual equivalent of what — promiscuity? degrees of separation? a daisy chain? Point Blank is chockful of similar craziness — images that seem to remind the filmmaker (or Lee Marvin) of other images, and suddenly we are hurled back into a previous scene, or a future scene — where the same words or similar words — are spoken. Film Historian David Thomson calls it “a wistful dream and reflection on how movies are just fantasies.” Yes, but what also interests me is the girl inside John Boorman, the lady who drifts aimlessly from allusion to illusion — very unlike Lee Marvin who is out to get that money, period. Poetry is gendered. It is women’s work. (So why weren’t there more great women poets? It’s called oppression.) But since poetry is essentially feminine there’s always a certain amount of overcompensating going on. That’s why Hemingway had an obsession with big guns and lean prose. James Joyce, I am quite certain, was a sexual submissive, obsessed with cunnilingus — it’s apparent not only from his dirty letters to his wife, but also from his, excessive, complex, ornamented writing style. A dominatrix friend once explained to me the difference between a top and a bottom: ‘Do you want to decide what you’re going to do in bed or let somebody else do it?’ Well of course I’ve always left the decision up to my effortlessly masculine partner. She also said: ‘since you are a submissive — don’t let a lot of people know, or they’ll make you wait at the end of the line at movies’. Well this was obviously John Boorman’s issue, ergo the men in his flicks are always tying each other up and shooting each other, while, paradoxically, the images are allowed to freely associate, and hook up with whom and whatever they wish, promiscuously. After Marvin turns on the TV he watches a concert, an old movie, a cartoon, and than an advertisement for cosmetics. Then he hears noise coming from the kitchen. In her anger, Angie Dickinson has turned on all the appliances in the kitchen — which he then turns off one by one. Soon she starts speaking to him on a loudspeaker (it's a very modern, luxurious house). It’s all has the feel of a dream. But we know whether we're awake or dreaming, don’t we? But couldn’t we not only be dreaming when we are awake, but also dreaming that we are awake? It’s the kind of uncertainty Lee Marvin wouldn’t like. There is one moment that makes me want to forgive John Boorman for all his excesses — that’s when Dickinson’s hand wanders aimlessly but lovingly over Marvin’s furry, muscled abdomen — did Boorman’s free association triumph over his heterosexual content here? Here's the question: would we rather be Lee Marvin the decisive killer, or Lee Marvin drifting lost among the kitchen appliances Dickinson has deliberately left on? The choice that seems less free may just seem less free — that is, it may seem deceptively so.
