Thursday September 28, 1989 1
SAT WHAT?
Rainbow
I was talking with my old child
hood buddy Bob Smith the other
day when 1 noticed he wasn't
wearing any clothes.
"Bob, buddy," I said, "1 know you're
glad to see me, but..."
"I'm protesting," he said.
"Protesting? Protesting what, 50
50 fabrics?"
"No. I'm protesting the fact that I
can't go nekkid on campus anymore."
"Ahhh, I see. You mean the new
ruling that prohibits streaking."
"Yes. I feel it's my fundamental
right as a human being to strip off all
my clothes and run around wherever
and whenever I feel like it."
"I'm not going to go into your per
sonal life, Bob, but don't you know
that it violates several laws and that
the administration finds potential for
personal injury in it?"
"Personal injury to whom?" he
snorted.
"Women, I guess."
"How?"
Several visions came to my mind,
but my superego fended them off with
a baseball bat.
Joe Bob gets serious
W!
hen Robert Penn Warren
died last week, he must
have known that nobody
reads his books anymore except when
they're assigned in school. Nobody
has time for his long perfect sen
tences. Nobody has time to feel or
hear or see or take in that much
with their senses from something as
flimsy as a printed page. He was the
poet laureate of the United States,
the kind of hale-and-hearty larger-
than-life gentleman who, a hundred
years ago, would have had parades
in his honor. But, in American news
papers, his obituary was smaller than
the Ayatollah Khomeini's.
The problem with Robert Penn
Warren is that he didn't stand for
anything. And Americans can't
stand that. If only he'd been like
Solzhenitsyn, who stands for fierce
independence, suffering for the Re
ligion of Art. Or maybe if he'd only
disappeared mysteriously, like J.D.
Salinger, a genius who must be alone
with his majestic mind. All these
men will be praised more lavishly,
just watch
But Robert Penn Warren was con
cerned with something simpler:
words. He wanted them them to be
true and clean and as close to the
lying, tortured, confused soul of us
all as he could get them. But no
body cared about that. What they
cared about, when Warren was inter
viewed, was whether he had any
politics. Or, to put it another way,
everyone seemed to want to know
what he was trying to do. It's the
modern "People"-magazine disease
of caring more about what you say
you are than what you are, or more
about what you say you want than
what you have. In Warren's case,
wants to
John Bland
"Well, don't you know that they
also think it's degrading to women?"
"It's not degrading to women, it's
degrading to me."
"Degrading to...?"
"See, whenever I get nekkid and
run around through a bunch of girls'
dorms, not only am I providing them
with entertainment, I'm giving my
self a good ego reduction."
"How?"
"Do you know how degrading it is
when a girl laughs at a nekkid guy?"
"All too well."
"Then you understand perfectly."
"If they don't want to look they
can close their eyes. But show me
one girl who doesn't want to," he
smirked.
After much thought, I realized that
only one woman I. knew would
probably not want to look, so I asked
for her thoughts on the matter.
he didn't care what people thought
he was, what people thought he was,
what people thought he wanted. He
cared simply about what the words
were. Not what they meant.
In one of his brief forays into
economics and politics, in a 1930
essay, he said the problem with black
white relations is that everyone starts
from the wrong end; they have con
ferences to talk to one another, when
what they should be doing is unit
ing in labor movements against the
factory owners who use their fears
of one another to get the cheapest
wage. They don't have to talk at all.
They don't even want to talk. They
don't have to put on any shows. It's
what they do that matters. Obvi
ously, not a man for the sentimen
tal post-sixties "let's make everyone
feel welcome and happy era.
But that's beside the point. The
reason that Robert Penn Warren is
unknown to the majority of Ameri
cans is that he dealt in a currency
that's been devalued. He thought
that fiction and poetry had more
power than legislatures. And yet he
lived to see AU the President's Men
become more famous than the origi
nal. The one the people bought more
copies of was about a weak but
shrewd political operative who was
hounded out of office by a couple of
reporters. Robert Penn Warrens
version was about a generous, lust
ful, greedy, large-hearted, beloved,
hated, poetic and ruthless Southern
governor. "What was he again V the
public would say of Willie Stark.
He was complete. He was human,
He doesn't sell as well as the
journalist's imitation.
Robert Penn Warren died in his
sleep. Good. Joe Bob Briggs
shoot my
"Rainbow," I asked, "how do you
feel about streaking?"
"Male or female?"
"Male, of course."
"It's degrading to women."
"Why?"
"It forces us to look at something
we may not want to look at."
"Can't you close your eyes?"
"Oh, sure!" she retorted. "Take the
easy way out! The old pigeonhole
bit! Force us to close our eyes! Re
strict our freedoms! That's just like
you men, you know that?"
"But I'm just ask "
"You think you know all the an
swers, don't you? Well, listen here,
bucko, one day we're gonna rise up
and put you where you belong!"
"On the silver screen?"
"No! In the gutter, with your filthy
male jokes and your filthy male
dominated entertainment media that
presents women as objects, and I'm
. damn glad I'm a woman and I would
never never never want anything to
do with your filthy kind! Besides, we
women are destined to dominate blah
blah blah," she continued, so just to
If you know what's good for
you, youll check this flick out
ext week, the greatest Eyet-
lian drive-in movie in his
tory, made by the greatest
Eyetalian director in history, based
on the greatest Eyetalian story in
history one of those that doesn't
make a lick of sense, like all Eyet
alian stories is coming out on video.
If you remember this movie from
when it first came out in 1976, then
you'll wanna get the complete ver
sion, uncut, in original Cinemascope,
where they get the whole screen as it
originally looked at the drive-in, and
then run black bars at the top and
bottom. This one's a limited
collector's edition for anybody who
wants to pony up $89.98.
You know what I'm talking about
by now, don't you?
It's here.
It's Suspira.
It's been 13 years, but it's still like
taking a bad-acid trip through Alice
in Wonderland, only instead of Alice
we've got Jessica Harper drugged with
"wine" that has the consistency of
blood, and instead of Wonderland
we've got the German dance acad
emy run by some grody-looking old
ladies who go somewhere every night
at 9:30 and leave the innocent little
girls in their dorm rooms to try to
figure out why giant maggots are
dropping out of the ceiling and mess
ing up their hair-dos.
This movie is so weird it's impos
sible to describe, which is why true
horror fans rank it with Night of the
LivingDead and The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre as one of the scariest flicks
in spatter history. It satisfies the first
rule of of a drive-in classic: anybody
streakirV
change the subject I asked:
"Well, would you go out streak- .
ing?"
"No, because I wouldn't want to
give you men a cheap thrill."
"That's assuming a hell of a lot,
Rainbow."
Then she started spouting off about
"women's rights" and "I can make
you into one of us right here and now,"
and I basically decided to get the
hell out of there while I could still
sing the bass line to "Blue Moon."
(Actually, Rainbow's real name is
Laverne and that her parents were
not at Woodstock. In fact, her dad's
a plumber and voted for Nixon.
Twice. Guess with that hanging over
your head you'd want to change your
name to "Rainbow" too.)
Noting that streaking might vio
late the campus code, I called up my
buddy Charles H. Hungadunga, who's
studying law and has "worked with
the honor court before.
"Charlie"
"Charles," he said, correcting me.
"Uh, Charles," I said, "do you re
ally believe that the honor court
can die at any moment. And the
second rule: the innocent must suf
fer. And the third: the zombies must
rise. And it adds a fourth: the music
on the soundtrack has to be so nerve
wracking that, even when nothing's
happening, it's scary.
Dario Argento has made a whole
slew of great slasher flicks The
Gallery Murders, Four Flies on Gray
Velvet, Inferno, Tenebrae and he
just finished a new one called Edgar
Allan Poe, but Suspiria is the Gone
With the Wind of Eyetalian horror.
(You have to see the ending to under
stand.) Jessica Harper sets off for Freiburg,
Germany, in a white dress, carrying
a suitcase, but when she gets there,
the airport is vacant, it's raining so
hard you can't see two feet, no taxis
will stop for her, the streets are flood
ing, and when she finally makes her
way to the school, a girl runs out
screaming, the door is bolted, and
Jessica is told to go away. At this
point, Jessica decides to take a hotel
room and try again the next day.
Uh-oh, wrong choice.
Meanwhile, the screaming bimbo
is getting attacked by two giant eyes
in the sky. Her head gets rammed
through a glass window, then she's
stabbed four or five times in the stom
ach, then her lieart is carved out of
her chest no, it's not over yet
then she's dropped through a giant
Joe Bob Briggs
f '
friend
would go after someone just for streak
ing; that is, if charges were pressed?"
"Absolutely. The honor code could
be used in a case such as this, if enough
evidence is presented."
"We're talking bare facts here,
right?"
"A complainant would also have
to press charges."
"The flashee, in other words?"
"Then the student attorney gen
eral would decide if a case could be
built around the charges. If so, the
case would go before the honor court."
"Y'know something, Charlie," I
said, "I sure hope it won't result in a
hung jury, because I don't think it'd
be something you could cover up,
and then your case load would get a
little behind."
There was silence on the other
end.
"Those are jokes, Charlie," I said.
"Jokes?" Charles H. Hungadunga
sounded confused. "Oh, we don't al
low those in the honor court."
(Hey, I didn't say they were funny
jokes. If I started being funny you'd
expect it every week.)
skylight and her neck is snapped with
a 50-foot-long rope. Some lady tries
to help her and whoops! giant
glass pane to the head, steel support
beam through the chest.
Now, like I say, it was two giant
eyes. That's it. It's an Eyetalian deal.
Then later on, there's a blind guy
with a seeing-eye dog who's attacked
by a completely invisible presence. You
know, ever once in a while you see
some American guy try to do this,
and it's boring. They do it all over
Italy, with these hard-rock rub-a-dead-chipmunk-over-an-electric-guitar
musical scores, and it scares
the bejabbers out of you. '
That's all I'm gonna say. Like I
say, it's a drug trip.
We have two breasts (and many
twinkle-toed young girls cavorting in
body stockings). A 97 on the Vomit
Meter. Eight dead bodies. Millions
of dangling maggots. One bat attack.
Head scissoring. Throat slitting.
Throat ripping. Flesh eating. Death
in a vat of barbed wire. Multiple stab
bing. Hanging. The most disgusting
snoring ever put on a soundtrack.
Gratuitous ballet dancing. Gratuitous
German beer-all elbow-slapping
weenie dancing. Wind Fu. Rain Fu.
Witch Fu. Drive-in Academy Award
nominations for Jessica Harper, as
the dreamy-eyed drugged-up Ameri
can girl who's being fattened up for
the kill; Dario Argento, the master;
and Joan Bennett, as the dance in
structor who decided to go into witch
craft for the money.
One for the ages Suspiria.
Four stars.
Joe Bob says check it out.