Are you ready
for possibly the weirdest, most insane movie ever made? Check
out Chris Jordan's in-depth article about this should-be-cult-classic and find out.
Have you ever seen a film so absolutely, indescribably nuts that it renders you speechless? A movie that leaves you staring at the screen, mouth agape as the credits scroll, wearing a catatonic stare as you ask yourself, “what the hell did I just watch?” I'm not talking about a film that disturbs you into a state of shock; I'm talking about a film that is so utterly weird that you can barely comprehend how it was produced by a sane human mind. A film made with such unhinged imagination that probably no one besides its filmmakers had ever thought that way before. Think about films you've seen that made you feel that way. Think about a movie that you might be tempted to call the weirdest movie ever made. And then let me tell you that you're probably wrong; there's almost certainly a way weirder movie out there that you haven't seen yet... and it's called Dr. Caligari. No, not the 1920 landmark of German Expressionist cinema; I'm talking about its hallucinatory 1980s counterpart that seems like it fell through a rift from another dimension where everyone is utterly mad. Strap yourself in: we're going deep into the annals of obscure film history to unearth the strangest movie you've almost certainly never seen.
Stephen
Sayadian and Jerry Stahl's Dr. Caligari is
a difficult film to describe, as mere words cannot do it justice. It
is a nightmare produced by a troubled mind, which follows no internal
logic except that of a bad dream. It is extremely unsettling, yet
also campy and darkly funny. Its art design is eye-poppingly surreal
while also minimalist. Its acting isn't “good” in an objective
sense, but it is exactly what it needs to be. Its script willfully
avoids making sense in a way that recalls William S. Burroughs, yet
is very, very quotable. It's the sort of movie that you can't fully
be prepared for until you've experienced it yourself. I am unsure of
whether it can truly be said to have a “plot” in the typical
sense, but such as it has one, it revolves around the inmates and
doctors who inhabit the Caligari Insane Asylum, a dystopian hospital
in a nightmare world. The star patients are a
chronically-hallucinating nymphomaniac (Laura Albert) and a creepily
cheerful cannibal (John Durbin), and the hospital staff is caught in
a tug-of-war between the obviously crazy Dr. Caligari (Madeleine
Reynal) and her merely really weird chief of staff (Fox Harris, best
known as the lobotomized scientist from Repo Man).
The journey these characters go on is less a linear story and more of
a slippery and surreal tumble through a bad dream about sex and
madness and death and repression, full of haunting images and
hilariously non-sequitur dialogue.
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| "This is the cell where we keep the viewers who lost their minds after seeing this movie." |
In a
way, what director Stephen Sayadian has done with Dr.
Caligari is take expressionist
filmmaking to its absurd (though perhaps logical) conclusion. Just a
year before this film, Tim Burton brought the sharp angles and deep
shadows of German Expressionism crashing into the 1980s with
Beetlejuice, giving
the art form a hyper-stylized neon facelift. Dr. Caligari
takes what Burton did to extreme reaches, going back to the art
form's silent film roots and modernizing it with a fierce, gleefully
excessive vengeance. No, this film is not silent... but Sayadian
directs his actors to deliver all their lines in the stilted,
exaggerated, not-entirely-human manner that silent film actors had to
use to overcompensate for their inability to speak. Doing this in speaking roles
is really, really bizarre, and it serves both to deliberately call
attention to the artificiality of the whole thing, and to further
cultivate the nightmare-like quality of it all. They are real, live
people who somehow have dove right into the Uncanny Valley. It's a
bravely weird choice, but for what the film is going for, it really
works. Sayadian's art design, meanwhile (yes, he also is the film's
production designer), looks like it came from Burton's psychotic evil
twin. Sharp, angular set-pieces painted in bright neon colors
populate the environments, in stark contrast to the pervasive sense
of gloom created by the shadows. These set-pieces float isolated in a
black void, embracing the artificiality of the production's
sound-stage environment while also further adding to the contrast of
color and darkness. Into these scenes come visuals which are truly
the stuff of nightmares: a wall of flesh with a giant mouth and
tongue, a birthday cake with internal organs, a man with a baby
doll's head and a straight-razor. Much of the imagery is extremely
psychosexual in a way that's reminiscent of a possibly-even-weirder
David Cronenberg; the emphasis is definitely on the “psycho.”
Equally
unpredictable and bizarrely psychosexual is the script, by Sayadian
and Jerry Stahl. It has no desire to ground its madness in any sort
of rational reality, and offers no sane characters to provide
audience identification. It simply dives headlong into craziness, as
if to simulate for viewers the experience of being immersed in a
hallucination, or losing their minds. I mean all this as a
compliment: while this approach to writing certainly won't be for
everyone, it is ultimately what allows Dr. Caligari
to stand alone as a truly unique film. The only other movie I can
think of with a script so immersively mad is Eraserhead,
but this may even be stranger: Eraserhead
at least is set in a clearly recognizable nightmare vision of
blue-collar America, while Caligari's
universe doesn't even have a clear real-world analog. Stahl's
dialogue is as deliberately stilted as the performances delivering
it, with lines that are so bizarre that viewers will find them as
endlessly quotable as they are head-scratching. Lines like “Describe
your life in three words or less.” “Un. Ending. Torment.” Or
“pleasure will short your circuits; I could leave you an erotic
husk.” Or one character's sole refrain of “Chinchilla!
Chinchilla! Chinchilla!”
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| Lynch, Cronenberg, and Tarsem... eat your surrealist hearts out. |
At the
time he was writing this, Jerry Stahl was living under the influence
of a severe drug addiction, which he later chronicled in his
autobiography Permanent Midnight,
the film adaptation of which starred Ben Stiller as Stahl. His script
for Caligari has a
distinctly William Burroughs-esque feel to it, in the unnatural
dialogue and strange, fractured logic of the not-quite-narrative, and
one cannot help but wonder if his heavy substance abuse at the time
contributed to the similarity of style and sensibility. It seems
likely that it had some effect; after all, the film basically does
play out rather like a bad drug experience. But it's equally possible
that the similarity is simply the result of the two writers thinking
along a common anarchic and avant-garde wavelength; it definitely
would take a very particularly warped creative mind to come up with
this stuff, regardless of how that mind might be altered. After Stahl
got sober, he wrote a bunch of episodes of CSI,
the second of which (2001's Slaves of Las Vegas)
introduces a character he created: the philosophical dominatrix Lady
Heather. With her poetic monologues about the philosophy of BDSM,
Lady Heather seems like she dropped in straight from the world of Dr.
Caligari (albeit filtered
through the more accessible lens of network TV), leading me to draw
the conclusion that while drugs may have amped up the weirdness of
Stahl's screenwriting, the ideas, sensibility, and dark humor are all
his own. But either way, Dr. Caligari
is Jerry Stahl's very own Naked Lunch:
his career-landmark fractured masterpiece. Make no mistake: it isn't
all just quotable weirdness and hallucinatory situations. There's a
lot going on in this script on the idea level, even if it is often a
bit hazy.
There
are a lot of compelling themes kicking around in Dr.
Caligari's mad world, at least
in fragments: themes about the hypocrisy of American sexual
repression, about the fluidity of sexuality and gender expression,
and about the existential pain of gender dysphoria. The central
philosophy of the film seems to be that the complexities and
ambiguities and multifacetedness of sexuality and gender are
essential to the human experience, but the ways that our uptight
society tries to force those things into neat and polite boxes are
not only mad, but breed madness in those who try to abide by such
social mores. In other words, “polite” society is insane, so why
drive yourself even more insane than you probably already are by
repressing essential parts of your identity? As Dr. Caligari says,
“you've got to learn to just say yes,” to your madness and your
sexuality. As with everything else in the film, Sayadian and Stahl
approach the themes in such an unhinged, scattershot, lunatic way
that you have to go a bit mad yourself to approach it all from an
analytic standpoint, but these ideas are certainly there in potent,
jarring flashes. As with its approach to narrative, the film doesn't
really tell you these things so much as it lets them wash over you,
like a deeply unsettling dream that you know is tapping into
important issues in your psyche, but that is doing so in a somewhat
oblique way that makes it as difficult to pin down as it is haunting.
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| Why can't more reboots be like this? |
Sayadian
and Stahl had previously collaborated, exploring similar themes and
art styles, on a piece of transgressive cinema called Cafe
Flesh, which experimented with
the use of pornographic content for ironic purposes of social
commentary (though the experiment yielded only debatably successful,
if oddly compelling, results). Dr. Caligari
was meant to be their debut feature calling-card to announce their
arrival to the midnight cult crowd. It should have marked the start
of a brilliant career of strange movies for the duo of
provocateurs... but alas, it was not to be. As it stands, this is
their last collaboration, and the only wide-release film that they
made together. Shortly after this, Stephen Sayadian became very ill,
and dropped out of the film industry to recover. After writing a few
episodes of Alf and
Twin Peaks, Jerry
Stahl likewise dropped out of film for a while to get clean, but
re-emerged in the early-2000s as a successful screenwriter in his own
right. His screenplays include Bad Boys II and
the Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen vehicle Hemmingway &
Gellhorn, in addition to his
recurring TV work. Sayadian has yet to make any similar public
comeback, but it is worth noting that his career in the 1980s is
quite a bit more substantial than just Caligari and
Cafe Flesh; in fact,
you've probably seen some Stephen Sayadian art without even knowing
it was his. He directed music videos throughout the '80s, including
The Ramones' Pyscho Therapy,
Weird Al's I Lost on Jeopardy,
Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me,
and Wall Of Voodoo's Mexican Radio
– all of which bear his very unique visual style. He also was a
prolific designer of movie posters, including the iconic one-sheets
for Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse,
Brian DePalma's Dressed To Kill,
and John Carpenter's The Fog.
With
the unique vision and talent on display in all of those works –
especially the glimpses of what he could do with a larger budget in
the Ramones and Rockwell music videos – it is all the more
unfortunate that Dr. Caligari stands
at Stephen Sayadian's last film, when it should have been his first
big one. But on the other hand, if he is going to go down in history
as a one-major-film director, at least that one film is spectacularly
unique. More unfortunate still is that this one film has been allowed
to fade so far into obscurity: it has been out of print since the
mid-1990s, with its rare VHS and even rarer laserdisc commanding
insanely high prices, while no official DVD release is anywhere in
sight. While a film this audaciously unusual certainly won't be for
everyone, it deserves to be more well-known – and more easily seen
– in cult cinema circles. A company like Severin, Synapse, or Arrow
really needs to give it a blu-ray restoration and get it back in
print; it seems like something they (and their customers) would snap
up in a heartbeat, but perhaps it has faded so far into the
netherworld of obscurity that it isn't even on their radar. In the
mean time it is at least relatively easy to see without having to buy
an overpriced used tape or bootleg DVD-R, as it can usually be found
– unofficially, of course – on streaming sites like YouTube. If
you're lucky you may even be able to locate a version that is sourced
from its quite nice-looking (though still sadly fullscreen) laserdisc
transfer, which is a definite step up over the more common VHS rips.
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| "This is your brain on VHS." |
Still,
a film this unique deserves better than to only be available through
bootlegs. Perhaps the best way to encourage a cult-savvy blu-ray
label to rescue Dr. Caligari
from its sad fate is to get word of the film back out there, and to
rekindle its cult status via the streaming versions that currently
circulate. Getting in touch with those labels about the film couldn't
hurt either; given its unusual level of obscurity, it's totally
possible that they might not even know it exists. If this is your
first time learning about the good Dr. Caligari and her asylum, do
yourself a favor and locate a version to watch... if you're feeling
brave. I've done my best to describe the film and its context, but no
words can really do it justice, or prepare you for the one-of-a-kind
experience that you're in for when you watch it. It's a trip that you
have to take for yourself. You may not be the same after Caligari has
experimented on you... but that's because you will have experienced
something totally unique, which is a rare thing to find in a movie.
Chinchilla!
Chinchilla! Chinchilla!
Score:
- Christopher S.
Jordan