BRACE YOURSELF
CABIN DOORS TO MANUAL
(and now to the picture that breaks the shock barrier)

One cold evening in the 80’s I went along to Jacksons Lane Art Centre in North London to watch Shock Corridor.
I’d tried before.
It was in Philip Jenkinson’s front room and he’d laced up his own 16mm projector (I used to be his painter and decorator).
Too caught up in a fug of stoned befuddlement I (mis) remember grafting great chunks of Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat Kill Kill Kill onto Inside Marilyn and The Naked Kiss. It was a mess.
There was work to be done.
So.
The polished stairwells and tiled corridors of the Art Centre were conducive to this winter’s entertainment. I sat in my coat, muff and clownshoes and warmed to the story that was unfolding (again) in front of me. I was dizzy after the film. Frederick Wisemen's Titicut Follies had flirted with Gunvor Nelson's Take Off to beget a premature One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
(It wasn’t until many years later that I realised Martin Scorcese had started incubating his very own demented noir in the form of Shutter Island).

But in amongst the cacophony was a story:

A writer wants to win a Pulitzer Prize by uncovering the facts behind a murder inside a mental hospital. He pretends to be mad by relating accounts of incest with his imaginary sister who is played by his go-getting go-go dancing girlfriend. He manages to get locked up in the institution where the murder took place. Once inside he is sidetracked by the behavior of his fellow inmates and eventually succumbs to the thing that is Bonkers. Shock therapy treatment unleashes no end of mayhem. Dali and his dream sequence have nothing on this. 

BRACE YOURSELF
CABIN DOORS TO MANUAL
I’ve always had a hard time writing fiction. It feels like driving a car in a clown’s suit. You’ve got to get somewhere, but you’re in costume and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the one in costume, and everybody else is meant to forget about it just pretends it’s not happening.
A Paul McCarthy Happening;
Chocolate, ketchup and mayonnaise.

ACTION.
Fuller gets stuck in.
And once all the hyperbole and machismo has settled down and the mad are sitting comfortably a surrealistic wind begins to blow through.
Brainwashed communists, racists and traitors.
A lot comes at you.
There is no place to hide.
Deluded Confederate Generals, black Ku Klux Clanists and atomic scientists.
They keep coming at you.
Nymphomaniacs (love-maddened women), a man in a straitjacket and an Aspirant to Incest.
Hitchcock and his dream sequence have nothing on this
Loopy mess.
The smell of the industrial disinfectant wafting along the corridors and the inmates that repeat things over and over and over again.
The looping.
The loopyness.
The claustrophobia that fills the air.
The sound design via the mastication of food and the rattle of plates.
It makes you
Wonder.

BRACE YOURSELF
CABIN DOORS TO MANUAL
We’re going back in.
“FOR THE BIGGEST JOLT THAT EVER HIT YOU IN A THEATRE
INTEGRATION AND DEMOCRACY DON’T MIX
GO HOME NIGGER”
Hard sometimes to put a finger on what’s happening.
Inverted racism, sexism and off-your-rockerism.
But despite the many ham-fisted edits, manic action sequences and questionable politics, there seems to be a one-take aesthetic;
Shoot and be-done-with-it that I like.
I relate to it.
I want the contingency of life, the unpredictability, the unknowability, the mysteriousness of it all.
The haphazardness.
This is best captured when the work can bend at will to what it needs; fiction fantasy, memoir, meditation, confession and reportage.
Collage, bricollage and right-carry-on.
And then there’s the voiceover technique.
The speaking-out-loud-of-the-characters-thoughts, pioneered as Inscape thinking by Gerard Manley Hopkins (frowned upon nowadays as overly expositional and a cop out).
An artform lost to modern cinema perhaps having been polished to perfection by Cissy Spacek in Badlands.
But the themes are writ LARGE
And
L O U D
Tarantino has always given it a go; films at full pelt so that the skin slides away from your face. Django Unchained might even have fallen out of Shock Corridor in a fuzzy haze of titillation and the niggerword outrage. 

Sometimes
There’s so much story that there isn’t a story. But it’s not the story. It’s just the breathtaking world that’s the point. The helter-skelter of it all. The story’s not important; what’s important is the way the world looks, is the way it makes you look at the world. It’s what made me feel things when I careered out into North London’s wintry night all those ever-so-many-years-ago.
Full of discombobulation and befuddlement.
Lucidity and then vagueness.

HE IS NOT INSANE
BRACE YOURSELF
CABIN DOORS TO MANUAL
What I realised was that what surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name and moving on, but invariably I find it impossible to give things a name.
Film Noir as a dark place, and within this place; anguish and suffering. 
Perhaps Fuller was pursuing torment, the torment of the American Dream and out of the exploration of this torment was his own quest for salvation.
His torment a nation’s torment.
And as in Frederick Wisemen's infinitely superior and astonishing Titicut Follies we witness a nation that might die if it no longer has the strength to invent new gods, new myths, new absurdities and new enemies.
Its idols blur and vanish and in a paranoid frenzy of self-preservation it goes walkabouts looking for them elsewhere.
America’s got talent.
Avatars for schizophrenics. 
Enough now.

Oh the trouble with being born.

Ps The bundle of approximations and inconsistencies that sits down for breakfast is later reborn as the work intended
Or
Every form of haste, even towards the good, belies some form of mental disorder.

Andrew Kötting
(Rushing)
St Leonards-on-Sea
July 2013