Samuel Fuller

Writer-producer-director Samuel Fuller, who died last October at the age of 86, has been something of a paradoxical cinematic figure for the last 30 years. While revered by film professionals, and a profound influence on contemporary filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Wim Wenders, years of forced inactivity have cost him his audience. Nobody out there knows who he is any more.

Starting tonight, Cinematheque Ontario will take a crack at redressing that situation, presenting a complete retrospective of Fuller’s writer-director work, Pulp Fictions: The Films of Samuel Fuller. Twenty-two features will be screened, virtually any one of which will feel like a good bottle of bourbon smashed over your head.

Fuller was undoubtedly American cinema’s greatest master of what might be called the two-fisted school of writing and directing. His movies have Army-tough titles like Fixed Bayonets and Pickup on South Street, and are populated by hard-boiled criminals and hard-bitten dames, soldiers and prostitutes, cocky journalists and crazies. Stories appear to have been ripped straight from the pages of yesterday’s dime-store novels; dialogue is notable mostly for it’s utility and economy of means. (A sample from Underworld USA: “It was a pretty tough break you had, being born in prison and your mother dying there.”)

But let us not confuse two-fisted with ham-handed: if this is moviemaking reduced to its most basic terms, Fuller gives it the virtues a good pulp novelist would. A Fuller project starts with a bang, moves along at a good clip, has a sound emotional structure, snappy dialogue and ferocious attitude. All of the above are brought to the screen with a visual chutzpah that recalls Orson Welles on PCP. All in all, it takes you places you cinematically never dreamed existed—what Quentin Tarantino and Jean-Luc Goddard played at, Samuel Fuller actually was.

This is not to say that after a steady viewer diet of recent Hollywood filmmaking, his cinematic universe doesn’t take some getting used to. For example, 1957’s China Gate might seem to the Fuller neophyte to have been made by a crazy person. A hard-boiled romance-adventure set in 1954 Vietnam, China Gate begins with the disconcerting words: “this movie is dedicated to France.” Shot with such visual economy that the studio had to insert fake closeups into the location footage with an optical printer, China Gate features Angie Dickenson as an alcoholic half-Chinese prostitute leading a multi-lateral group of commandos to destroy a cache of weapons somewhere in North Vietnam—weapons guarded by a Vietnamese chieftain portrayed by Lee Van Cleef.

Fuller claimed cinema was “like a battlefield.... Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion!” A collateral benefit is that his battlefields sometimes feel like domestic melodrama. (Imagine John Wayne casting Maureen O’Hara as his romantic lead in The Green Berets and you’ll have a ghost of an idea what China Gate feels like.) And as in a battlefield, narrative feels confused, elliptical, sometimes nonexistent. A Fuller story jumps all over the place and often the only continuity left to a viewer is an emotional one. Two questions constantly force themselves upon you as you watch: First, what on earth is going on here? Second, why am I enjoying it so much? After a while, you stop asking the first question.

It’s a wise course of action to take if you plan to watch a lot of the man’s work. A lot of potentially unsettling things await the unwary, like the almost absurd cold-war cant of many of his 50’s movies, or the alarming tendency of a lot of his films to briefly turn into musicals for no particular reason. (Sometimes both happen at once—In China Gate, Nat King Cole, not long after crooning the title song, says he’s fighting in Indochina because there are “still a lot of live commies around.”) Romance doesn’t develop between characters so much as it simply occurs, without explanation, excuse, or credibility.

Reading the reviews of 30 and 40 years ago you get a sense that critics more happy in the company of directors like Elia Kazan and Stanley Kramer found this kind of thing all very embarrassing. Seen today though, it arouses awe more than anything else (you move beyond wincing about five minutes into your first film); it seems wonderful that in an age of such false sophistication as the 50’s that anybody would be so brazen—Holden Caufield would have gone nuts over this stuff.

He would have been particularly fond of 1963’s Shock Corridor, Fuller’s history of postwar America from the point of view of an outsider pushed to the screaming point. Here an egomaniacal reporter gets himself committed to an insane asylum in order to solve a murder; once there he slowly goes crazy himself. The extremely high-temperature melodrama sometimes camouflages Shock Corridor’s seriousness of purpose: Fuller makes it clear that what has made the inmates insane in the first place is post-war America. Shock Corridor skates along the edge of hysteria for most of it’s running time, and once falls gloriously off the edge into what must be the single most surreal episode of anti-racist filmmaking ever to appear in an American movie.

1964’s The Naked Kiss is virtually all over the edge, as if Blue Velvet had arrived on the scene 20 years early. Something amazing happens in it just about every 90 seconds: Absurd bursts of fantasy, handicapped children breaking into song; from one moment to the next you have no idea where the director is going—it’s as if the screen has been hard-wired directly to his id. Naked Kiss is Fuller’s most gloriously out-of-control exercise, and it pretty well killed his career.

One can’t help but see parallels between Fuller and another director whose Hollywood career ended at about the same time, fellow melodramatist Douglas Sirk (although Fuller is Sirk only by way of the Army stockade). Both had trouble finding critical support because of the perceived cheeziness and lowbrow appeal of their work. Yet to dismiss Fuller’s cinema as mere pulp fiction is like dismissing Douglas Sirk’s melodramas as big-screen soaps: superficially accurate but profoundly untrue.

Fuller and Sirk actually share many of the same virtues: the—sometimes shocking—emotional immediacy of their direction (and if you think it’s easy, have a look at what happens when Steven Spielberg tries it); the beauty of their images; the propulsiveness of their storytelling and the simple, almost insane watchability of everything that they put up on the screen. Their movies are designed to overpower audiences: Sirk with a tug at the heart, Fuller with a sock in the kisser.

You go with the tools you’ve got, I guess. Fuller is revered by film people for his great cinematic eye but even more for his authenticity; his courage to utterly and uncompromisingly be his crazed self when he makes a film. As an employable filmmaker this probably cost him the last thirty years of his working life. But they are also the qualities which makes virtually everything he has ever shot compulsively viewable for those of us on the other side of the movie screen: He gives us everything there is up front and holds nothing back. We love Samuel Fuller because he wears his guts on his sleeve.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998

Ring-a-Ding-Ding

For me, it all started at about 3:00 am on February 9th, 2008.

At that moment I woke up coughing so ferociously that I ended up injuring a whole set of muscles in my chest. Over the next 10 days, I had every classic flu-like symptom you can name, with one particularly obnoxious addition: a persistent, irritating ringing in my ears. The flu-like symptoms gradually packed up and moved on. The ringing, unfortunately, moved in to stay. At the walk-in clinic up my street, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was pretty bite-down-on-this-bullet about my situation: “At your age, it's probably tinnitus,” he said, pausing gravely after giving the ringing its clinical name, “and that can be a real pain in the ass. You'll just have to get used to it.” The ear, nose and throat guy I ran into sometime later confirmed this standard medical advice: “You've got the kind of tinnitus that either goes away or doesn't,” he said.

Depending on whose figures you read, anywhere from seventeen to thirty percent of humanity has tinnitus in some form, the majority of them being older people. This at first seemed an outrageous figure to me, since I'd almost never heard anybody talk about it. But now that it's happened to me, it seems that everybody my age has a tinnitus story. Whenever I complain about it, the response invariably is “Oh, I've had tinnitus for years”, or “I know somebody who's got it.” It's like the elephant in the doctor's waiting-room: Either we're dealing with a scourge that has cowed a large part of the older population into silence, or we're looking at a condition where its denial is simply a part of being able to lead a normal life---like the schizophrenia sufferer who's learned to ignore the FBI agents following him everywhere.

Tinnitus is a perceived sound without any external source; a phantom perception like the “phantom limb” sometimes felt by people who've had amputations. Tinnitus most often comes in tandem either with the hearing loss you can expect when you age, or---paradoxically---an oversensitivity to noise called hyperacusis. In the less aged, it's usually the result of long-term exposure to loud noise---a phenomenon the Hearing Loss Association of America may some day dub Ozzy Osborne syndrome. Whatever its efficient cause, it's a product of the nervous system: Bits of the nerve pathways normally associated with hearing fire off phantom signals which your brain interprets as sound.

Unfortunately, it's usually irritating sound as well: sufferers have reported it as a clanging, hissing, roaring, or whooshing; like breaking glass, clicking, shrieking, banging, or owls hooting; as a ringing, buzzing, chirping or sizzling; or the sound of rushing water and chain saws. So far nobody's complained of it sounding like Britney Spears covering Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, but it'll probably happen sometime.

It's a very private affliction: Most people won't notice anything wrong with you, at least partly because when you're with other people, the problem's not as bad---you're distracted, and talking seems to drive your private noise into the background as well. (In fact, if you're a complete party animal, tinnitus is probably no big deal for you---most of your day you're either completely distracted, or unconscious.)

Tinnitus intrudes when you most want quiet and repose; when you're alone, with your Self. You have no peace, no solitude, nowhere to simply withdraw---there's always this obnoxious reminder of everything that's bad about the world constantly buzzing in your head. What's particularly maddening is that since this interior noise is most effectively suppressed when you're in the presence of others, it soon begins to feel like you exist only for others. At its worst, tinnitus robs you of your sense of self.

Whatever else you may say about Google, it does allow you to achieve a state of futility in research far more quickly than you ever used to be able to. For the most part, the web offers little scholarly information for people who want to do something about an illness. You're given unparalleled access to people offering quack cures, prayers, and exhortations to Nietzsche-like acts of will. But you're given no theory; no method. Nothing to do.

That's why the phrase 'Tinnitus Retraining Therapy' caught my eye when I was trolling through Google Scholar for something worthwhile to read about tinnitus---it sounded like work, and that sounded good. The reference turned out to be a Cambridge University Press title: Tinnitus Retraining Therapy: Implementing the Neurophysiological Model by Pawel Jastreboff of the Emory School of Medicine and Jonathan Hazell of University College, London. What I was able to read of it on Google Books introduced me to a thoroughly scholarly analysis of the my problem, whose chief virtue was that it gave me something to do; a disciplined hand in my own recovery. (Publishers worried about the access Google Books gives online readers to their product can also breathe a sigh of relief---I ended up buying the book.)

The gist of the authors' argument runs something as follows: There are a lot of people out there with tinnitus, but only about a quarter of them find it troubling enough to go and see a doctor about---the rest experience it but don't suffer from it. What are they doing right?

What their brains have done right is to habituate themselves to the phantom sounds: their limbic systems (that section of the brain responsible for emotions) have learned to be unperturbed by the dissonance, in turn allowing their autonomic nervous systems to place the tinnitus on a sort of Do Not Call list of neurological signals that can be ignored. People with brains thus habituated can call up their tinnitus sounds if they concentrate, but the signals themselves no longer intrude on everyday life. Their tinnitus has become, in effect, background noise.

How do you get from something as irritating as seagulls screeching on your balcony and as persistent as an automated telephone bill-collector, to background noise? Ideally, what you want to do to make a nerve impulse less offensive to your limbic system is simply turn the volume down. Unfortunately, that option isn't available.

But you can turn the background noise up. In my case, I bought a $20 MP3 player, transferred a file of wide-frequency white noise onto it, set it on “repeat”, and listened to it throughout the day through a pair of ear-bud headphones. The volume is set just below the level that would cover up the tinnitus completely: You want it to be there still---after all, you're trying to get accustomed to it, not pretend that it doesn't exist.

And it's not much more complicated than that. The process of habituation can take months, but the relief is almost instant---however the retraining process proceeds, the background noise you're now carrying about with you certainly helps you get through your day.

So, in a sense, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was right---I am just going to have to get used to it. But I've acquired a tool that at the very least makes my days a lot easier to endure. Results at the moment are still up in the air---every day still seems a new adventure---but a good attitude helps. Like the chain-gang captain said to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, “you have to get your mind right.”

-Published in Zoomer Magazine, Winter 2008