***½/****
starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt
written and directed by Oz Perkins
by Walter Chaw Thematically, at least, Oz Perkins reminds me most of Sofia Coppola, in that all of his films are autobiographical examinations of the relationship between isolated, creative, depressed children and their absent parents. Not abusive parents, mind (not exactly, in any case)–more parents lost in labyrinths in the company of goblin kings. Perkins uses negative space to suggest presence in the way that absence can become a palpable thing. Not a state in which one could lurk, but the lurker itself. After a parent is gone, they’re not really gone, because the space they used to occupy can take over all the light in your world. It’s a shadow of a naught. It happens when you’re not paying attention, and it happens because the absence of what is essential becomes physical in time. The golem of being forgotten is still preferable to being alone. I have the image in my head of Frankenstein and the little girl he drowns out of love. Their filmographies, Perkins’s and Coppola’s, are exquisite autopsies of the various forms the friendship takes between golden orphans and their parents. They tell it in the way their parents might understand them. It is their gilded grief that guided them to their seat behind the camera. Film is their native language, and so what they write in it is fulsome and tactile, full of subtext raw and personal. It is the cinema of solipsism, and it tends to be beautiful, self-indulgent by nature. And sometimes, but not always, it can even resonate with lost children vibrating at the same strange frequencies.
Perkins’s best film as writer-director is still his first, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Called February on the festival circuit, it’s set in a snowbound boarding school for girls over winter break, where young Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) is stranded because her parents haven’t picked her up. They aren’t neglectful, though. Possibly, they’ve been murdered. Moody, terrifying, the picture has the feeling of a day spent playing in the cold–sledding, building, trudging–and then coming inside and sitting by the fire as your vision goes dim. Perkins’s father, actor Anthony Perkins, died in 1992 from complications of AIDS. His mother, model turned actor and photographer Berry Berenson, was on one of the airplanes that flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. There is a phone call in The Blackcoat’s Daughter to Katherine we can only hear her side of, but in the encroaching black at the edges of the screen, we know the news she’s getting. If you’ve lost a parent unexpectedly and learned of it by telephone, the scene captures how, no matter how old you are, you are in that moment a child whose parent has forgotten to pick you up from school. When this happens, it’s your first glimpse of what the world will be like now that you’re alone. Perkins’s new film, Longlegs, has the same extraordinary insight into the primordial fears of childhood. It’s what Perkins does–and he pulls it off with all the dazzling formalism of Stanley Kubrick. Some find Kubrick’s films cold and enigmatic, too: glowering and as frictionless as a frozen waterfall.
The prologue to Longlegs features an odd, one-sided conversation between a little girl and a stranger she knows she shouldn’t be talking to but from whom she can’t extricate herself. The little girl is Lee (Lauren Acala), and the stranger is Longlegs, a serial killer whose look Nic Cage has said he based in part on T. Rex‘s Marc Bolan. (More on this below.) The film begins from the backseat vantage on the passenger side of a vintage 1970s station wagon, which pulls up to a house where Lee, in her room, is drawing. She puts on a coat and crunches across the snow, and Eugenio Battaglia’s astonishing sound design fills every channel with discrete noises, backwards-masking, discordant strings. Lee is wrong to leave her house. Lee is wrong to talk to strangers. Every detail of the soundscape increases the peril we perceive Lee to be in. These first ten minutes offer the finest distillation of childhood terror since maybe the staircase sequence in Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo or the thunderstorm in Poltergeist. And it isn’t because we are afraid for the little girl who is being bad–it’s because we recognize what it feels like to transgress: that general, atavistic memory of how stepping off the path means getting eaten by a wolf. Perkins denies us identification with the killer by shooting from the backseat. The point-of-view doesn’t belong to anyone we can see, though we might speculate that if Longlegs abducted us, this is where we’d end up. Perkins invites us, in other words, to assume the role of a victim. Longlegs says, “There she is, the almost-birthday girl,” in a lisping, high sing-song. “Oh, but, it seems I wore my longlegs today. What happens inside?” It’s the sort of coffee-talk overheard at Lewis Carroll’s mad tea party, the one where “un-birthdays” are celebrated with march hares and dormice. It almost makes sense, and in that space between does and doesn’t, there be tygers.
Perkins offers lyrics from T.Rex’s “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” as an epigraph, while the film’s titles unfold to the same band’s “Jewel.” Both are elliptical songs from the intersection of prog-rock and glam, and much has been made of Longlegs and his appearance as some kind of grotesque drag. I think it’s more a riff on Bob Dylan’s “Baptiste” era, immortalized in both the Rolling Thunder Revue footage and Dylan’s 232-minute hybrid documentary Renaldo & Clara. Dylan in this period played the harlequin, complete with white-face makeup. In interviews, he enjoyed being cryptic: “I am other,” he said, espousing Norman Raeben’s concepts of “no time”–that is, of all time existing not as a linear sequence but as a single moment. The fluidity of time and identity is key to Perkins’s work for several reasons. I think Perkins, as an artist (one who made his screen debut at age 8 in Richard Franklin’s Psycho II, playing his father as a child), understands he will always be engulfed by his father’s enormous shadow, and I think that film, in its existence as an artifact that encompasses various lengths of time literal and manufactured, is itself a bit of a quantum object Perkins employs in bridging his current state with the eternal child. The way children of artists express themselves is through a multiplicity of selves to match their parents’ kaleidoscopic, manufactured realities. Longlegs may also be modelled after Tiny Tim, who broke a great deal of ground during the time of T.Rex’s ascendency in terms of broadening the cultural acceptance for letting one’s “freak flag fly,” as they used to say. His marriage to “Miss Vicki” on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” in 1969 was, at the time, one of the most-watched televised events in history. He was a novelty, yes, and a mystery popular pundits tried to solve. What was his deal? Who was he really?
For me, and this is impossible to quantify, much of the music from this period, steeped as it was in mythology (Tolkein, pot, booze, LSD), gives me the willies. I love psychedelia, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of AM Gold superstars–The Zombies, The Specials, the work of Gordon Lightfoot and Mott the Hoople, Moby Grape, Donovan, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, the great Terry Reid (whose transcendent album Seed of Memory inspired Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects)–make me feel…uncomfortable. They are nostalgia’s hangover: the dregs of that sweet nectar that’s a bit too saccharine, too granular, full as it is of the remnants of memory that distillation has failed to purify. When I listen to T.Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer,” for instance, released the same year (1971) as “Get It On” and “Jewel,” I get the absolute heebie-jeebies: “I danced myself right out of the womb/Is it strange to dance so soon/I danced myself into the tomb/Is it wrong to understand/The fear that swells inside a man?” These lyrics aren’t meant as succour, after all. Instead, they’re a species of Timothy Leary’s provocation to expand understanding. To break on through to the other side. I think Perkins has the same emotional mnemonic reaction to these songs. T.Rex is perfect as an instant portal to time and personal place: the child listening to a spinning vinyl totem throwing off nonsense that almost means something. That, again, is where there be tygers.
A “tiger” is also what the now-grown Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), given Dracula’s first modern victim’s surname and an FBI Special Agent’s badge, calls a collection of coloured squares in something like an implicit association test she’s forced to take to challenge her fitness for the field after a work-related trauma. Brunette, heavy-browed, lost in a brown suit maybe a half size too big for her, Lee is peculiar, dissociated. When she stays at the home of partner Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), she is instantly relegated to the “children’s table,” the bedroom of Carter’s little girl, Ruby (Ava Carte). Lee can’t make eye contact. She asks what’s happened to one of Ruby’s sports trophies, and Ruby says, “Its head got cut off, I don’t know where it is.” Lee says, “I guess that’s more my job, isn’t it?” Ruby compares herself to veal, and it’s the first time Lee smiles in the film–but I’m not sure if that means she thinks it’s funny or just apt. Longlegs is about a young woman who has never dealt with a Big Bad Thing that happened between her and her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt). I’ve always liked the name Ruth because Keats refers to Biblical Ruth in his ode “To Autumn.” “Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid alien corn”–which could be Keats speaking of his grief at the recent loss of his beloved brother, Tom. I love the image of faithfulness to the memory of the dead, even as death causes the familiar elements of the world around us to grow strange, alarming in their uncanniness. What could be more quotidian than corn? What could be worse than corn that is alien? Lee and Ruth have a relationship based on things they can’t talk about. Harlan Ellison once wrote about his fury at the death of a friend and how he would still ask him questions, but he couldn’t hear the responses anymore because the gulf between them now was full of winds that whipped the answers away.
All this to say that Longlegs is a very effective Oz Perkins film and only an occasionally effective horror film. It’s reliant on iconography rather than narrative reason: cutting instruments in the blurry extreme foreground; cyphers and codes, literal and metaphorical, printed on paper you handle while wearing rubber gloves; bloody crime scenes that trigger crimson memories, like when Ruth recalls the moment of Lee’s birth and “what a day that was. I bled, bled, bled, bled, bled…” It’s about comparing memories of your childhood with your parents’ to find them enraged you’re not grateful they’ve kept things from you. “You’re not a child because you were allowed to grow up,” Ruth says. “This is a cruel world, especially for the little things.” And now I’m thinking of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, where good Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) tells her little darlings, “It’s a hard world for little things.” The Night of the Hunter has a bogeyman, too, supernatural and done up in an insidious disguise but trapped, thank God, on a few thousand feet of phantasmagoric celluloid, moral in hand with somewhere safe and warm to heed the warning. There are guardrails like that for Longlegs as well. It’s another story that exists inside of an individual and remains, essentially, as insular as a fable.
Looking to contextualize Longlegs, the obvious reference points are The Silence of the Lambs, because it centres on an FBI agent who is a woman, and Se7en, because it’s stylish and there are journals and taunting notes. But a better, if still imperfect, analogue is Argento’s Deep Red, because aside from having in common a repressed axe murder and nearly-animate dolls that represent the childishness of evil, that film shares a real sense of uncanniness with Perkins’s. Ultimately, the best comparison might be to the Southern Gothic stories of Flannery O’Connor–listen to Kiernan Shipka’s monologue about halfway through the picture and tell me I’m wrong, “you dirtsy-flirtsy little angel bitch.” Longlegs is about how people are deadly, unpredictable animals held in check, barely, by accidents of chemical balance and favourable circumstances. I think it’s about how our dim and insufficient sentience is so desperate for meaning that we hold to ritual, religion, and the lie of law. In our panicked darkness, we hold onto memories of a childhood Eden, as if we were ever innocent. We do it to keep ourselves from eating the flesh and drinking the blood of more than just the man who died in the act of forgiving us for doing it. We show our gratitude with our flashing teeth and eyes; we bring him back every week to eat him all up, again and again and again. We are never full. We are the Wild Things.
Ruth asks Lee if she still says her prayers. Lee says, “No, Mom, I never said my prayers, never once. They scared me.” Your prayers scare the shit out of me, too, since we’re on the subject. Longlegs is the phone call from the pier in The Lords of Salem where a friend calls his friend who is in trouble and tries to save her but knows it’s too late. Sometimes, I look at the last texts and messages I left for people in my life who have died and try to tell myself I said enough before it was too late. Longlegs is Perkins’s reassurance that I’ll never stop looking at them, that it’ll never have been enough and never make sense. Of course it’s too late, baby girl, the only person you can ever save in this obscenity is yourself. Longlegs is a horror movie, but the monster is how you knew it was all going to end in tears but no one listens to children. You’re the monster, and you keep the child that was you in a cage made of bones. You’re the monster, and that’s why everyone you loved has left you alone.
