The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 31-September 6
Candy Mountain (1988)
Directed by Robert Frank
Frank saw not just the parting of the clouds that led to the freedom and love and acceptance and radicalism of the 60s, he saw the car crash that followed, when the love met the hate, the violence poured into the streets, and the artists he loved and came up with died, or worse, became accepted as tokens of a wild counterculture that had been dampened to uselessness. Frank was never turned into Jesus by the market like Jack Kerouac, Che Guevara, Malcolm X or William Burroughs. His wildness was never mistaken for a desire for domestication and he lived on as marginalia, watching his family shrink and his peers drift. Some of Frank’s loneliness and confusion made its way into Candy Mountain, which he made with Rudy Wurlitzer. Like Frank, Wurlitzer stayed in the shadows to survive. The two of them wander up through the wooly Canadian wilds looking for solitude, peace of mind, a reason to keep living on the straight and narrow. Kevin J. O’Connor, back when he was going to be the next James Dean, plays a kid who wants to be an artist, but who’s stuck running errands for David Johansen, whose hard edges had been sanded off by that point. He was a film actor, for god’s sakes. How much more safe could he get?
Along the way he passes one more rocker or poet, one brick-throwing hellcat older than the last guy who thought he’d never make it to this age. He encounters Joe Strummer, Arto Lindsay, Rockets Redglare, Tom Waits, Dr. John, Roberts Blossom, Leon Redbone, Bulle Ogier, Wayne Robson and finally Harris Yulin’s Colonel Kurtz in this frosty Apocalypse Now. The chill of a Canadian winter has to take the place of napalm heat while O’Conner realizes there is no secret reality to flee to, not anymore. The hope is dead and gone, and the further north he goes, he’s just one step closer to the truth that even your idols sell out. Everyone does. How else are you supposed to stay warm? Frank and Wurlitzer knew the rules that their ilk used to live by were unstable at best, untenable at heart, and as long as capitalism held sway, the things they once touched would only be measured in the money collectors would be willing to pay for them. The lives of rebels had dollar signs next to their names, and the anger would be palpable if the sadness weren’t so much louder. The horror will always find you. It found Frank even as he, like Yulin’s recluse, retreated as far north as the elements would allow. He dreamt so loud we could hear him, so naturally his number came up. Candy Mountain is a fictional place, where the jails are made of tin, as the song goes, because we keep walking back inside, accepting that the artist will always be someone’s property. Candy Mountain will always be a long climb towards an anticlimax, but as long as gatekeepers ignore its lessons, it will always be relevant. Those of us on the margin need to know there’s continuity to our suffering, purpose to our longing. We’ve always been lost but there’s beauty in never getting where you’re going. Scout Tafoya (September 1, 7pm, 9:15pm at BAM’s Frank series)