77: Vampire (Movie) Weekend

The past two nights, I watched a double feature of sorts, thanks to Doc Films at the University of Chicago. The theater programs a different series every night, and this quarter's schedule is astounding: pre-noir gangster movies on Mondays, movies about false preachers in partnership with U of C's Divinity School on Tuesdays, an Ang Lee retrospective, grindhouse movies late on Thursday nights, and "Amour Fou"– "mad love"–on Fridays. This week, I caught Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973, part of the grindhouse lineup) and Park Chan-wook's Thirst (2009, Amour Fou). Both are vampire movies, in keeping with the season, but I found that both resonate with the Tuesday night False Preachers series as well.

Ganja & Hess grapples directly with the role of religion in colonialism and the Black diaspora. Doctor Hess Green (Duane Jones) is an anthropologist studying an ancient civilization of blood-drinkers from Africa; after being stabbed by a knife from that civilization, he becomes a vampire himself. He then meets Ganja (Marlene Clark), the estranged wife of the man who'd stabbed him. The two fall in love, and he turns her. Whenever either of them feels the need to drink blood, the score gives way to a drumbeat and chanting, as though some ancient power has reached the two from out of the past, taking hold of their actions until they have no free will beyond the instinct to drink. After he tires of his new predatory nature, Hess returns to the Christian church he used to attend. It's an attempt to conquer his new nature; he can only die if the shadow of the cross touches his heart. The movie is ostensibly about Hess, but Marlene Clark as Ganja owns the film from the moment she first appears on screen. At first, she's horrified by her new existence. But as Hess slides away from his own need for blood, Ganja embraces her new nature with a conviction that Hess clearly never felt. And therein lies the False Preacher resonance: Hess can't commit to something he professed to believe before he was turned. After he turns, then grows disillusioned, there's no place for him either; for Hess, there's no room for uncertainty under the terrible shadow of the cross.

Thirst is about a Catholic priest named Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) who, as the result of a medical experiment seeking a cure for a deadly disease, dies and comes back with an appetite for blood, for sex, and for everything else he'd given up for the church. Being a Park Chan-wook movie, Thirst is visceral, with a woozy roving camera that underlines its bloodier moments, heightening them. It's also wickedly funny, and only gets perversely funnier after Sang-hyun begins an affair with Tae-ju, the wife of Sang-hyun's childhood friend. The two quickly lock themselves into a death spiral of blood and lust, though Sang-hyun drags his feet unwillingly into his new nocturnal existence. He tries to live his life as a principled vampire, refusing to kill out of respect for the church that raised and shaped him. His morality stands at odds with his new nature, and he's cornered by the world opened up to him by his baser instincts. Like Ganja before her, Tae-ju eventually embraces the amorality that vampirism offers. Hess turns back to Christianity, Ganja rejects it, Sang-hyun tries to live with it, and Tae-ju tries to fight it. The friction between Sang-hyun the lapsed Catholic and Tae-ju the committed atheist hits a fever pitch strong enough to ignite both. Sang-hyun in particular can't deny either of his two opposing natures, although they both ironically revolve around body and blood. He must drink human blood, and he must return to the Eucharist, and neither is compatible with the other.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I reviewed David Fincher's The Killer, which is in theaters this weekend before hitting Netflix November 10. This was a joint issue, with Kevin contributing a review of the documentary The Mission, also out in limited release this weekend.

What I'm listening to:

The Mountain Goats released a new record this Friday, which means I'm listening to the new Mountain Goats record all weekend on repeat. Jenny from Thebes is in close conversation with one of my favorite Mountain Goats albums, a lo-fi affair named All Hail West Texas. West Texas is haunted by a handful of recurring characters who used to appear frequently throughout the band's earlier albums, but who have faded into the background in more recent years. One of those characters, the titular Jenny from this newest record, has always been mysterious and meteoric; the beauty of Jenny from Thebes is that it fleshes out some details about who she is, and what happened to her, but it doesn't give us everything. The album traces the arc of a story, gives us concrete details beautifully abstracted– there's a line in one song about lighting a cigarette on the cooktop–and some difficult decisions, . Rather than returning to the brief, bare-bones acoustic songs of West Texas, Jenny from Thebes transposes the character's story into a more lush musical setting, one that feels no less desperate for its production and restrained polish. It's like wiping the dust off a mirror to find unlooked-for details in the corner. I can't wait to let the album's songs soak into my bones.