Assemblage

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet 

The scream of terror, of pain, of death, still fills my ears as I contemplate the heap of crumpled bedclothes spread like so many rags on the floor, an improvised altar whose folds are gradually dyed a brilliant red, in a stain with distinct edges which, starting from the center, rapidly covers the entire area.

The fire on the contrary, once the match has grazed a shred of lace soaked in gasoline, spreads through the whole mass all at once, immediately doing away with the lacerated victim who is still stirring faintly, the heap of linen used in the sacrifice, the hunting knife, the whole room from which I have just had time to make my escape.

When I get to the middle of the corridor, I realize that the fire is already roaring in the elevator shaft, from top to bottom of the building, where I have lin­gered too long. Luckily there remained the fire es­capes, zigzagging down the façade. Reversing my steps, then, I hurry toward the French window at the other end. It is locked. No matter how hard I press the catch in every direction, I cannot manage to release it. The bitter smoke fills my lungs and blinds me. With a sharp kick, aimed at the bottom of the window, I send the flat of my sole through four panes and their wooden frames. The broken glass tinkles shrilly as it falls out onto the iron platform. At the same time, reaching me along with the fresh air from outside and drowning out the roar of the flames, I hear the clamor of the crowd which has gathered in the street below.  

I slip through the opening and I begin climbing down the iron steps. On all sides, at each floor, other panes are exploding because of the heat of the confla­gration. Their tinkling sound, continuously amplified, accompanies me in my descent. I take the steps two at a time, three at a time.  

Occasionally I stop a second to lean over the railing: it seems to me that the crowd at my feet is increasingly far away; I no longer even distinguish from each other the tiny heads raised toward me; soon there re­mains no more than a slightly blacker area in the gathering twilight, an area which is perhaps merely a reflection on the sidewalk gleaming after the recent shower. The shouts from a moment ago already constitute no more than a vague rustle which melts into the murmur of the city. And the warning siren of a distant fire engine, repeating its two plaintive notes, has something reassuring about it, something peace­ful, something ordinary.  

I close the French window, whose catch needs to be oiled. Now there is complete silence. Slowly I turn around to face Laura, who has remained a few feet behind me, in the passageway. “No,” I say, “no one’s there".

Down In The Sewer

'"Ladies want to weaken us", a lay yogi told me. "They want our semen - they will not say so, but they will rob us of our only power."'

- Agehananda Bharati, "The Light At The Centre"

"It’s only the children of the fucking wealthy who tend to be good looking"

- The Stranglers, "Ugly"

The Stranglers are one of those bands who, if they hadn’t existed, would probably have to have been invented. Spectacularly malignant even by the standards of their day, their viscous, visceral sound provided the backdrop for the most fetid of lyrical concerns. If misogyny was a commonplace amongst 70’s rockers, with The Stranglers it was ontological. Indeed, to accuse The Stranglers of misogyny is much like accusing Liberace of kitsch.

However, it would be wrong to place The Stranglers in a continuum with what had come previously in the decade. With their debut album, 1977’s "Rattus Norvegicus", there was something very new in the way they portrayed men’s relationship to women. Rather than being cocks-of-the-walk in the Mick Jagger/Robert Plant mould, men are relentlessly portrayed as the weaker sex. Instead of having a whole lotta love, The Stranglers gape into the Mersey Tunnel equipped only with a sausage.



Flaccid and post-coital rather than priapic and anticipatory, the misogyny of The Stranglers was not that of the braggart who treats women like dirt, but of the sexual failure who is reduced to voyeurism and violence. Whereas The Rolling Stones could casually jettison ex-lovers as "Yesterday’s Papers", in "London Lady" it is Jean-Jacques Burnel who is raging about being used and discarded. Underlying all of "Rattus Norvegicus" is the tremendous melancholy born of impotence. "Goodbye Toulouse", "Princess Of The Streets" and "Hanging Around" take us through rain-washed streets and piss-stained alleys with their throngs of love-addicts. Hugh Cornwell is forever pushing his nose up against the window of the brothel and contemplating his next dose of humiliation, while Burnel’s bass rumbles around the back of your skull like a resentful memory.

"Peaches" takes us to the seaside for more heavy-duty ogling, but again there’s no contact, just deluded fantasising. "Ugly" is an extraordinary eruption of inchoate rage, Burnel seething that he can be sexually out-competed by an ugly old fart who happens to have money. The Stranglers understood too well the cord that connects sexual failure with violence.



Finally, The Stranglers take us to where all bodily fluids eventually end up. "Down In The Sewer" demonstrates why they identify so strongly with the rat, enough to make it their mascot. For The Stranglers, sexual desire turns men into rodents - inquisitive, instinctive vermin. Depicting the male sexual experience as one of envy, frustration and humiliation, "Rattus Norvegicus" is the most thorough demolition of masculine conceit ever recorded.

The follow-up "No More Heroes" album, released the same year, was even more combative, though focused more on settling scores with those, real or imagined, who had crossed them. It featured two remarkably offensive tracks that were both inspired by pornography. "School Mam" follows the example of the kind of imported magazines such as "Color Climax" in which the same group of models would perform the same implausible sexual scenario in a variety of mundane social settings. "Bring On The Nubiles", perhaps still a little bit too strong for daytime Radio 2, depicts an equally implausible pre-pubescent orgy, this time given extra brio by the juddering bass-line and Dave Greenfield’s whooping organ, which almost blows a gasket, like an orgasmatron going into meltdown. However, the pay-off line ("I’m high beneath my zip") once more undercuts the song with its revelation of voyeuristic fantasy.



The Stranglers could probably have flogged this attitude forever, but something very strange was happening to them. The first inkling of this was the b-side to the single of "No More Heroes". With "In The Shadows", The Stranglers bypassed 1978, and made the sonic leap straight into 1979. Featuring dub-spacey production, bass as lead instrument, guitars as scratchy ambient accompaniment, and keyboards as synth-alienation effect, they had effectively abstracted their sound, and leapt far in front of their peers.



This new space was explored further on 1978’s radical "Black And White" album, in which their sound was strung out even further. Lyrically too, their vision had expanded. Awash with dread, the songs on the album primarily addressed the Cold War, but also the alienation induced by technology, the relentlessness of time and the atomisation of the individual. Even the remaining misogyny became abstracted, mythical, in the bizarre quests of "Nice’n’Sleazy" and "Toiler On The Sea". As well as being spacious, it is also a remarkably physical record - only Gang Of Four’s later "Solid Gold" can match it for metallic muscularity. Burnel’s bass playing still invokes awe in it’s mechanical suppleness - like pipelines creaking at the bottom of the ocean, or heavy machinery changing gear. Dave Greenfield is a one-man Radiophonic Workshop, equally capable of beaming in sounds from Alpha Centauri or the massage parlour next door.



By the time contemporaries such as Joy Division and PiL had sonically caught up with them, The Stranglers had already moved on. Their last album of the Seventies, 1979’s "The Raven", although considered to be their last "heavy" album, in fact laid the template for the rest of their career (notwithstanding the occasional concept album about alien abduction). Tight, professional, thematically diverse and pop-orientated, it prepared the way for the gradual softening of their sound. The Stranglers would continue to produce great records well into the Eighties, but the days when the Earth would tremble beneath their feet would be long gone.

Keep On Truckin'

Man's Best Friend: Straight on Till Morning (1972)

Straight on Till Morning (1972) is amusingly described here as 'like Ken Loach directing poor cow on LSD'; in fact it was the work of Peter Collinson, director of now ubiquitous 'Brit' film of the 60s The Italian Job (1969). If this was equally feted as a film of the 70s then we'd recognise something of the psychic/social extremity of that period. Spoilers obviously follow...

Rita Tushingham (Brenda) escapes from a spectacularly miserable looking Liverpool to a hardly much more thrilling 'swinging' London, claiming to her mother she's pregnant and going to find the father. Once there she sets out to find a man to make her pregnant, to give truth to her lie, deciding on James Bolam (not the most prepossessing swinging guy), but he, unfortunately, sleeps with her London 'best friend'.

Structured by bizzare editing the film opens and as truly disorientating, if not to say distressing, 'image' of 70s London/Britain. This is even before Tushingham, in scenes of painful awkwardness that perhaps belie Adam Kotsko's theory of the recency of this structural trait, meets her fatal partner - truly post-Norman Bates pretty boy psychokiller 'Peter' (played by Shane Briant).

Entering into a foile a deux, structured by Peter Pan, from which the film takes its title, they settle down in the mews house of the sugar mummy 'Peter' has previously murdered. He has one of those psychopathologies hopefully not present outside cinema (equal parts Norman Bates and Mark Lewis (Peeping Tom)) - murdering his surrogate 'mothers' and anyone he finds 'pretty' with that archetypal British weapon the Stanley Knife.
We see the depth of his pathology when he murders the dog 'Tinker' because Brenda as 'prettified' the poor creature to entice Peter. Settling into 'domestic bliss' (Peter regards women as there to cook and clean), eventually Brenda (now renamed 'Wendy') becomes pregnant. As she seems to have disappeared she is tracked down by her London best friend on behalf of her distraught mother. Unfortunately said friend meets up with Peter and, after sex, he murders her for being 'pretty'.

The most extreme and distressing moment is, unusually aural. Outside of the squelchy 'shunting' in Society, David Lynch's sountrack for Eraserhead, or the slaughtered pigs of The Exorcist, it contains one of the most horrifying sound sequences in cinema.

Peter likes recording his murders (parallel to Mark Lews's filming) and to prove his true nature to Wendy he locks her in the bedroom with a tape playing the sounds of his killing of the dog and the best friend. The sounds of the killing of the dog are truly horrible - obviously we're dealing with fiction, but there's something about the slow and painful killing of the dog that exceeds the sounds of the murder of the friend. I don't know how they got these sounds recorded and I don't want to know.

After escaping from the bedroom and trying to escape by Peter the pregnant Brenda/Wendy is presumably murdered by Peter (this takes place off camera). If we think of the literally suspensive ending of The Italian Job I doubt we could imagine a grimmer counterpart of the undecidable ending.

Of course the film inhabits the misogyny discussed previously here, in almost a parodic way, considering the general unpleasantness of the male characters and Peter's camply 'performative' masculinity (mixing in homophobia as well - it seems appropriate Shane Briant would later play Dorian Gray). On the other hand, the female characters are generally supportive, Brenda's mother is genuinely concerned for her and seems more confused by her daughter's fantasy life and disappearance. The best friend she meets in London may sleep with Wendy's prospective boyfriend and Peter, but she goes to find her and seem socially/sexually liberated, but not condescending or hostile to Brenda.

Therefore, we don't have 'anti-Oedipal' outsiders versus both straights and the newly-liberated hippies/hip, but rather hyper-Oedipal violent inversion. The fantasies of return to childhood are given a far darker edge than anything Denis Potter imagined, and the brutality, in the most banal 'British' way, captures a 'nihilism' that has nothing glamorous or punk about it.

It's the refusal of a 'social' or even 'psychological' explanation for this extreme but banal violence, beyond the usual post-Freudian cliches, that makes the film so misanthropic. A true product of the 70s, a film without hope.

The Apocalyptic Underclass

A Boy and His Dog (1975), although never a hit, was somewhat influential in its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world. Directed by L.Q. Jones (a character actor mainly known for his Peckinpah lowlifes), it has obvious echoes in Mad Max, not least in its post- technological inversion of the western (although some 70s westerns share motifs). Featuring a young Don Johnson as Vic, who 'scouts' a post-nuclear wasteland with the help of his telepathic dog Blood, it depicts a world where young men and boys (no-one lives long here) fight a war of all against all for food and women. Guns are the only guarantor of trade, and dogs are the smartest guys in the room. 

The 70s was the decade when various apocalyptic scenarios went mainstream. The disaster movie cycle (Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, various Airports, and any number of films where nature strikes back) modified the premise of the previous decade's On The Beach, with superstars as elites facing overwhelming disaster, attempting to survive it assisted by professional expertise. Along with the nightmare scenarios, the basic pleasure was waiting to see who made it to the end ("Ooh Robert Vaughn's dead! Will Fred Astaire survive?"). There was also novelty in the Grim Reaper not selecting victims according to status.

However, with their use of spectacular effects and all-star casts, the 'event' disaster movie had its low budget mirror image (often the case with 70s genres). The lewder, cruder apocalyptic scenarios of George A. Romero, Roger Corman or other 'exploitation' productions rarely featured elite characters or superstar experts who could eventually save the day. This time, the stories were largely told on the level of worn-down working stiffs, or indeed a dangerous 'underclass' excluded from labour value. Mirrored in their budgetary differences, these conflicting perspectives were a matter of class. The economic relations and emotional connections of bigger budget disasters were put aside to favour raw survival. With victims played by c-list actors, individual deaths were granted less dramatic significance. With stagflation, mass lay-offs and energy crises moving many urban areas towards 'post-apocalyptic' conditions, faith in technical expertise and organisation wasn't an option at the grindhouse (like the one still open for business in A Boy and His Dog, showing porn loops and old westerns). Nor did these films affirm family bonds in their traditional sense.

A Boy and His Dog generated fierce feminist criticism for its sexual politics. 70s cinema's obsession with rape has been discussed here, and this film is no exception in its disturbing attitude to women (also present in Harlan Ellison's original stories*). The figure of 'woman' - teenage Quilla June - is posited between a suffocating, (literally) sterile social conservatism and the most brutal form of post-capitalism, with women  the ultimate commodity - producer or product. Underground, women are reproduction machines in a grotesque version of Republican ideals (anticipating The Handmaid's Tale). Outside, women hide away for their own safety - hence the need for 'his dog' to sniff them out in exchange for food. Both 'societies' being caricatures of what each fears in the other; Quilla June's 'choice' is between a patriarchal prison of automated duty, or a feral 'me' generation of violent sexual predators. Much criticism focussed on her character willingly trading on these misogynist negations. Without giving away spoilers, family and 'love' are revealed as meaningless when pit against crude, ugly necessity.

Like so much of 70s cinema, it opens up stark polarisations without easy resolution. The idea of the repressive, family-driven small town vs. the lawless post-industrial wasteland still informs American political discourse (and has increasing traction in Europe too). In their youth, both Vic and Quilla June are little more than bewildered adjuncts of their respective worlds, fuelled by illusions of power and escape. The film was released in the dying days of Fordism, and more than its explanatory nuclear war, the film's anxieties fixate on masculinity as an unruly surplus, with women as its economic and/or biological battleground. This theme is now common to 'apocalyptic' scenarios, and not just in film. Although the big budget 'event' disaster has since returned to re-affirm family values, the supposed 'underclass' despair of A Boy and His Dog  - and similar low-budget 70s catastrophes - has disseminated into popular culture more pervasively than the gentrified, containable nightmares of Irwin Allen.

*Later - unfilmed - stories of Vic and Blood feature radioactive zombies, and a lot more 'survivor guilt'. Ellison's stories, like Romero's films, were deeply influenced by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - the urtext for innumerable novels, comics, films, TV shows and games since the 70s.

Permissive Society, Raging Bulls

Just some of the leading actresses (as they were then known) of the 70s who had key roles as victims of sexual violence:

Sissy Spacek, Nancy Allen, Faye Dunaway, Isabel Huppert, Jodie Foster, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Susan George, Diana Ross, Raquel Welch, Diane Keaton, Liv Ullmann, Mia Farrow, Charlotte Rampling, Joan Collins, Catherine Deneuve, Candice Bergen, Jessica Lange, Margot Kidder, Angie Dickinson, Stephanie Beacham, Sally Kellerman, Pam Grier, Mariel & Margeaux Hemingway, Farrah Fawcett, Lesley Anne Downe, Barbara Hershey, Genevieve Bujold, Brooke Shields, Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Krystel, Barbara Hershey, Susan Sarandon.*

Directors of the 70s - who used sexual violence in their key films:

Sam Pekinpah, Martin Scorcese, Brian Depalma, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertollucci, Michael Winner, Don Seigel, Robert Altman, Claude Chabrol, John Carpenter, Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell, Clint Eastwood, Alan J. Pakula, Pasolini, Jodorowsky, Wes Craven, George A. Romero, Jonathan Demme, Michael Ritchie, Paul Schrader, Marco Ferreri, Bertrand Blier, William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Richard Brooks, Arthur Penn, Luis Bunuel, Ridley Scott, and the grandaddy of them all... Alfred Hitchcock.**

These lists only cover the 70s 'mainstream' - we'll leave aside the endless reels of porn, exploitation, and 'video nasties' for now (or the many emerging national cinemas of the period). But the question remains: why, even if we allow for the easing of censorship, was rape such a defining motif of the 70s? How did its 'legendary' directors make such a name for themselves with an unprecedented level of visual misogyny? Why, from '68 onwards, was rape used so frequently, 'humorous' to horrific, left-wing to right-wing, leading the plot or as background incident, overwhelmingly man on woman, but also incorporating man-on-man, paedophilia, incest, necrophilia, bestiality... and even between humans and demons, viruses, machines or aliens? Particularly telling is how almost every genre and market (however 'niche') indulged in scenes of rape of some kind.

It's now common currency that late 70s/80s cinema was a restoration of sorts, but even then rape continued to march across screens regardless; this time with the 'rape revenge' cycle, in line with the right-wing agenda of the 'rehabilitated' hero on the side of law and order, family values, and imperial wish fulfillment. But for many films of the 70s that (at the very least) had deeply ambivalent attitudes towards the traditional hero and the ideology he represented, rape became the brutality du jour - standing in for capital in many cases, sometimes for the urban/ethnic hordes in need of 'cleansing', at other times for the unaccountable power of government and military, or uncontainable 'rebelliousness'.

The (re)emergence of feminism at the dawn of the 70s had a part to play, of course - but was it seen as that threatening so early? Unlike 40s noir (itself revived in a big way during the 70s), 70s male confusion and anxiety was reluctant to blame women outright for their woes. It instead became a ritual, a motif present in the most inappropriate of narrative arcs. A shorthand way of telling us the Hero Isn't a Nice Guy, or Capitalism Is Cruel, or The Orgy's Gone Too Far. Most telling of all, rape was something for men to deal with (or dramatically fail to deal with). Such ambiguities were often closed to the women concerned. If they were 'lucky', then it was a one night stand and/or silenced with a door slammed in their face. Otherwise it was rape, a gaping wound, or a long take of their mutilated remains to get the second act in gear.

It is perhaps telling how 'iconic' some of these films - and their 'maverick' auteurs - now are. Long awaited 'uncut' versions generate hype (among boys of all ages) restoring the kind of misogyny that censors and county councils once thought beyond the pale. How far we've come in the name of 'liberation'!

*You may find some of these names obscure. Of those that survived the increasingly juvenile casting demands of the 80s/90s, many continued in parts where they fight institutional misogyny (but win over the 'liberal' self-flattery of tinseltown). With the 'redemption' requirements of later Hollywood, they often came up trumps on a 'personal' level. A case in point being Jodie Foster, who went from being a twelve-year old prostitute (nearly all these actresses played prostitutes), to a court case/academy award winning gang rape victim, to her most successful role as a plucky FBI agent who melts the heart of a cannibalistic serial killer... to her current niche as maternal vigilante who's mad as hell and won't take it anymore.

**Of the surviving directors, many have the convenient niche of cynical hackery or basically remaking the same film over and over again, until that darn oscar shows up. They overcame misogyny by pushing female characters as far back as is narratively possible, and making maleness it's own melodrama.