To laugh at Edward D. Wood, Jr. is to miss the radical formal-ideological subversions that his delirious objects d'art all but flaunt in the face of pasteurized Eisenhower conformity. His feature debut, scrounged up from the shabbiest of artifices, zombie acting-being and stock footage, is a personal testimony, his most fervid attack on conventional narrative, and brother-in-arms for Maya Deren, Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity and, perhaps, Jean Cocteau. Sex-change and cross-dressing are the main anguished subjects, dissected in two plot strands by greasy doctor Timothy Farrell to baffled inspector Lyle Talbot, and Wood, further clinching the artist's need for direct expression, casts himself as Modern Man, butch but happy in high heels and fluffy loungewear. Wood's uncomfortable in his masculine clothes and lithe hermaphrodite "Tommy" Haynes is uncomfortable in his masculine skin, and both kneel before God's (Bela Lugosi) armchair in a skeleton-strewn lab before their bodily transgressions get accepted into the world. Lugosi thunders on about green dragons, puppy dog tails and big fat snails, though the lightning-punctuation is just the beginning of Wood's deconstruction of filmic syntax -- a shot of a radiator intrudes upon the reading of a tranny's suicidal letter, infidelity suspicion segues into superimposed stampeding buffalo, and disembodied voices clutter up images as bare as Rivette's. An abstracting industrial montage earlier on already implodes the opening crawl's claim for "stark realism," but the avant-garde centerpiece is Wood's dream-cataract, fiancée Dolores Fuller writhing under a fallen tree trunk, tilted décor, special-guest Satan playing wedding witness, and one full reel of legitimate stag tawdriness -- burlesque nymphos tearing off their dresses, stacked gals in bondage knots, a Vivien Leigh clone welcoming rape on a sofa. Wood's relentlessly individualized madhouse builds up to an ineffably moving crescendo as Fuller doffs off her angora sweater at him, while a work built on its own alternate Hollywood indicts an order's fear of difference while spitting on established concepts of "quality." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|