Cremaster 2

Barney is starting to drive me crazy. It would be simple if he were worthless, but he isn't.

Where I stand: I'm watching the Cremasters in numeric sequence and have seen number one. I've also seen two other projects. In half of the four, I felt rewarded. He's a bit too much preoccupied with notation than form, disconcerting in a sculptor, but "Drawing Restraint" and "Cremaster 1" had moments that were transcendent. The projects as whole compositions collapsed under their heft, but when they impressed, they really did.

Where he gets into trouble is when he tries to impose narrative. You can be visually strong in terms of pure form. Or you can be narratively strong using cinematic form, which is visual in a different way. He understand the first and is wholly incompetent in the second. Unfortunately here he "has something to say." Fragments of actual stories appear where they were avoided in the other projects.

Lynch knows how to do this. Medem. Tarkovsky. Its what I call the long form and it requires an understanding of whole realms not just bits from them.

Stay away from this one. It fails and the collapse is uninteresting.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

I only gave this a six, because it was a painful movie to sit through at the time, and I found myself very bored, frustrated, and begging the film to end. But as the film gestates in my mind I've been able to select the moments that did stick with me, and so I may see it again if the entire series is ever released on DVD and change my mind about the film. It made an impression, and that's more than can be said of most movies.

Barney continues his Vaseline-fetish, and I'm not sure what he intends it to represent, if anything, but where in the first "Cremaster" they seemed to exist as molds, the same way the women existed as identical objects from the same mold, here it's much more sexual in nature: when we see Gilmore smother two balls with Vaseline we can't take our eyes away; it's not sexy, but it's certainly sensual (if a malleable inanimate object can be called sensual). That soulless, cold sex is depicted physically with the robotic sex we see from below, where it looks like bees procreating.

There are a lot of individual moments that don't seem to have any relation to one another, but stick with you regardless: cowboy line dancing, a woman at a seance who toes a cowbell, Gilmore being sentenced by Mounties to ride a bull, men in a giant boardroom, and the scene with two of the most famous death metal musicians playing incarnations of Johnny Cash. Norman Mailer, too, should be mentioned, as he's perhaps the most memorable aspect of the entire film. (I haven't read his "The Executioner's Song.") 6/10

For me, this is the most interesting, and most 'story driven' of the series, although it's still very surreal.

Cremaster 2 combines the story of Gary Gilmore – who spends most of the 1st half sitting in a Mustang at a gas station that has an umbilical like tube attaching it to another Mustang (he and Nicole both drove Mustangs). He commits the murder, and then is executed by being forced to ride a rodeo bull until both rider and animal die of exhaustion.

We then go to a section involving Harry Houdini (played by Norman Mailer?!?) who may have been Gilmore's grandfather.

None of it makes a lot of literal sense, but it does work as cinema poetry. I suspect how anyone responds to this kind of work is highly subjective, and there are no right or wrong opinions. Only whether it speaks to something deep inside you or not

In the Cremaster cycle, I think the whole starts to tear the further we move away from the feminine absolute. There's already signs of breakage in just the second entry. This is, I believe, because as a sculptor Barney has natural intuitions about cinematic space, so at its best the work is pregnant with a feel and subdued, but as a guy and thinker - like most of our species - he is a blowhard.

So it's not enough to be quietly effective. He has to think big and show bigger. He has to have cool insights that hint at things of importance.

You will need no better clue than the guys he has chosen to surround himself with here, all of them tribal tokens. Dave Lombardo has a drum session, a really cool figure to have in your art film that shows you are not effete. Steve Tucker bellows into a phone. And of course no one cooler than Norman Mailer. Barney himself plays killer Gary Gilmore.

But wait, I get that this is meant to be about the onset of male aggression, so the figures have their proper place. Mailer wrote the book and all that. But it has to be Dave Lombardo and not just some drummer, don't you see? It's all a matter of association, as well and (skin)deep as choosing to wear a specific band's t-shirt.

So here's the overall problem with Cremaster; I believe they were conceived in terms of space first, solid sculpted space communicating the air around the matter. He decided for whatever reason to make films around the actual objects, to be sold together, and because a story would be too ordinary, he came up with the testicular concept, as silly as that, for a map and to give him a pattern to sculpt to, ovaries, penises, vaginal tunnels. The copies made would be limited, 10 of each package, so important enough to own, another tribal token of underground music. Later, he could have the chance to explain that all of that also substitutes for the creative process and has personal value (a less precocious insight is that every film reflects its creative mind, down to Bay's Transformers).

So look what happens. The film itself is the air around the things he wants to present and that air, let's say the breath of the camera as it dissects space, has appealing qualities. It resonates with a female mystery, nearly transcendent, discovered.

You should know, however, that when the Buddhist - or any spiritual practice - speaks of transcendence, the word is not vaguely synonymous with any other superlative, the 'ecstacy' is always a transcendence of self; a transcendence of who you think you are and what you think you have to say, all of that conscious effort about propping up a self. In practical terms, it means Marienbad. It means The Passenger.

So the film works in the way it was put together, in this being sculpted with a camera. But when we reach the stage where the form in front of that camera has to mean something, all of that associative context is bogus. None of it cultivated with deep intuition.

Our insight is that the landscape does reflect its creative mind. In our case, all of it is ego satisfied at its own erection. It's Kubrick with Guggenheim pretensions. It's Greenaway without the sometimes deep thinker in Greenaway.

Not since Warhol has a visual artist made movies as masterfully as Matthew Barney. "Cremaster" describes a muscle in the testicles, and Barney's career-long subjects--masculinity and the biological, rather than societal, roots of male behavior--are given a hypnotic treatment here. Barney organizes the movie as rigorously as if it were an argument; but rather than rhetoric the movie is powered by dream logic. For an image such as the soon-to-be-killed gas-station attendant sniffing around Gary Gilmore's car--two sixties beauties joined with a mass of canvas like Siamese-twin mutants--you'd have to go back to the top shelves of Kenneth Anger and David Lynch. Filled with genital prostheses and heebie-jeebie-giving hive imagery, CREMASTER 2 has a hidden, hivelike structure that suggests a way out of out post-MTV, post-web-surfing image surplus. Barney has at times seemed a preening poseur; CREMASTER 2 reveals him as focussed in his private ecstasies as Cocteau.