Apocalypse Then; Apocalypse Not

Terrence Stamp twits the establishment in "Toby Dammit"

The opening credits of Federico Fellini's "Toby Dammit" (1968) state that it is "liberally adapted from Edgar A. POE's novel, 'Don't wager your head to the Devil.'" That's a pretty apt description. After the credits, "Toby Dammit" picks up aboard a jet headed for Rome, heralding its more modern take on the gothic writer's works. Originally presented as the third — and best — part of the international omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, the short must have come as a shock to contemporary audiences, particularly following the feature's other, more traditional, period adaptations by Roger Vadim ("Metzengerstein") and Louis Malle ("William Walton"). It's still a shock today to anyone who actually reads. This isn't the world of Poe we've come to expect from high-school English classes. But in many ways, the film is as self-absorbed and oneiric as Poe's more visionary works. Like Poe, Fellini works from his subconscious to queer his chosen art form; he uses his medium to interrogate images he can't fully understand until he's worked them out in his art.

With seemingly random shots of nuns at the airport caught in a sudden gust of wind, their black veils and robes billowing around them, a roadside fashion shoot as the title character is driven to a television appearance and the grotesque participants in a surrealistic awards ceremony, this was the first film in which Fellini turned the dreamlike incursions from earlier works like 8 ½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965) into his style for a complete film. As such, it prefigures pictures like Fellini Satyricon (1970) and Roma (1972), in which reality is destabilized throughout.

The title character played by Terence Stamp with badly bleached hair and a zonked-out, other-worldly detachment is a one-time Shakespearean actor who's sold himself out for film stardom. He's in Rome to shoot a spaghetti Western his producers assure him is an allegory for the life of Christ. He doesn't care about their pretensions. All he wants is the Ferrari they promised as partial payment (a jab at Clint Eastwood, who had demanded the same compensation for taking a small part in 1967's The Witches). To forget this betrayal of his talents, Toby has soaked himself in drugs and alcohol. Terence Stamp plays him as if he were seeing things nobody else can (which is literally true in some cases, as he has visions of the devil as a little girl with long blonde hair and a white ball). In a way he's a satire of self-important actors of the day, reminiscent of Marlon Brando or Oskar Werner in some of their moodier interviews. And 50 years later, he seems to be prophesying the behavior of actors like James Franco and Shia LaBoeuf, whose off-screen performances of self often threaten to upstage their on-screen work. However much the character may be out of control, Stamp isn't. The beauty of his performance is that he makes original, idiosyncratic choices, yet you never lose faith that there's something behind everything he does. It's easy to let yourself get lost in his madness.

Fellini's vertiginous style is perhaps a little easier to follow today. We've seen his later films, other directors' imitations of his work and even television commercials and music videos mimicking that style. Yet it's no less potent for that. He's trying to accomplish a lot in this film. Overall, it seems to be sending up the very Euro-culture that made him a directing superstar. It's the same world in which Guido Anselmi felt trapped in 8 ½, yet with Fellini's more dreamlike approach here, it's all so over-the-top in its vulgarity that it's much easier to side with Toby, no matter how strange he may seem. In addition, there are parts pointing toward a more mechanized future — the airport monitors where a disembodied head advises on flights and weather conditions, the television interview with a mannequin-like host who has to crawl out of the shot so Toby can be interviewed by what, to the home viewer, would be a series of disembodied voices. It's a post-human culture in stark contrast to Toby's tortured humanity.

To obtain an American release for Spirits of the Dead, Fellini had to cut ten minutes out of "Toby Dammit." The American distributor, Samuel Z. Arkoff, felt the awards-show sequence was too personal to play in the U.S, as if Fellini were just working out his personal grudges against the Italian film industry. The sequence is restored in the version streamed by The Criterion Collection on FilmStruck, which is a good thing. It's central to Fellini's ideas and strengthens the motivation for Toby's wild drive in search of an open road, some kind of freedom, when he finally gets his Ferrari.

Yes, the sequence is filled with Fellini's personal grievances, but there's an underlying unity to it all. The awards scene extends the theme of dehumanization with a bitter satire of the commodification that takes place when art forms are excessively commercialized. The preening, self-important producers are too drunk with their own power to see how ridiculous and inhuman they are. When they announce the awards for actresses, the camera focuses on the winners' body parts, suggesting that the female form has been commodified as well. That joke plays particularly well today, as women are fighting for more equitable treatment within the film industry. Within the film's context it links to a scene just before that, in which a woman leaves one of the producers to offer Toby a life of happiness, telling him "I am the one you have always waited for." As will happen with the award-winning actresses, she's shot as a series of body parts, with emphasis on cleavage and her heavily made up eyes. She's just another commodity, like the Ferrari, offered up to keep him in line.

Toby himself is commodified. When he arrives at the awards ceremony, he's informed that he will be called up to say a few words, maybe some Shakespeare, but nothing too long. His new bosses want only enough of his artistry to give their work some cultural capital but not so much they might actually have to deal with the questions art raises. When he finally makes it to the stage, surrounded by models in fashions that make the human form something mechanical and variety entertainers who move like automata, he launches into the only possible Shakespearean speech for the moment, "Out, out brief candle" from Macbeth. He gets as far as "It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury," then stops, leaving out the speech's final two words, "signifying nothing." Of course, at this point, he doesn't need them. You can tell that this evening of self-congratulation is ultimately meaningless. For Toby, however, it's a kind of breakdown, an attempt at self-realization. He loses the thread of the speech, launches into a rambling diatribe about selling out his art and then runs out into the night.

By this point, it's pretty clear that Toby has nothing left to offer the devil. His soul was lost a long time ago when he chose stardom over art. In a final, desperate effort to escape he drives his Ferrari through the streets in search of what? Rome, he says, but also some kind of freedom or even reality. He keeps running into streets that are really movie sets, and the people standing along the road are mostly mannequins he eventually plows down.  He finally comes to a bridge that's been closed for construction. He sees the devil, the little girl with the ball, on the other side of a gap, and tries to jump it in his car. The leap for freedom (is the end of 1991's Thelma & Louise meant to echo this?) is his final wager, and he loses. There's a shot of a string of cable with blood before the camera reveals his blood lying on the road.

Although Spirits of the Dead was sold in the U.S. as a horror film, capitalizing on the popularity of Roger Corman's increasingly delirious Poe adaptations, that final shot is the closest Fellini gets to genre tropes. The true horror, however, is the nightmare world he's created. Toby has sold himself to a world that relentlessly eats away at humanity. In  a sense, however, Fellini is also a part of that world. He doesn't hesitate to exploit Stamp's sexiness (has any actor that good ever looked so appealing in the Mod fashions of the late 1960s?). Some of Giuseppe Rotunno's shots of him driving along the roads, with the breeze whipping through his hair, are almost stunningly erotic. That makes the film a form of meta-cinema, film commenting on itself. Does Fellini see himself as another Toby Dammit? That would certainly link the film to 8 ½. If I value "Toby Dammit" more than the earlier picture, it may be that the short film's brevity makes it less of a wallow in self-pity. Fellini sets up Toby's situation, then ends the film with a cinematic flourish that ties it into its genre while keeping it divorced from reality. It's a vision of an artistic apocalypse that's somehow light as a dream, albeit the kind of dream that can leave you shaken for hours after waking.

Norman McLaren turns mutually assured destruction into a human cartoon in "Neighbours."

Canadian animator Norman McLaren crams the apocalypse into eight minutes in his influential short "Neighbours" (1952), also available on FilmStruck and YouTube. Amazingly, even that short running time had to be cut for American audiences.

The film is simple, comic and powerful. Using a technique dubbed "pixilation," which involves filming human beings in stop motion, essentially making the human form into a machine, he depicts two neighbors living in harmony — one even lights the other's pipe as they're out reading in the sun — until a flower pops up between their properties. Each tries to claim the bloom, leading a series of escalating sight gags. It's reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy's comedies of destruction like "Big Business" (1929).  They build fences that conveniently swerve around the flower, then use the pickets to duel with each other, before destroying the fence, their homes and, ultimately, each other.

At one point they knock over the cutouts that indicate their houses, and each attacks the other's wife and child. That was considered too extreme for U.S. audiences in 1952, so the brief bit was cut. It must have made sense back then, as the film received an Oscar nomination for Best Short Subject and won for Best Documentary Short (an amazing miscategorization long since acknowledged by the Academy). By 1967, McLaren was able to restore the scene with no complaints. After brutal satires like Dr. Strangelove (1964), which may have been influenced by "Neighbours," and the current spate of body porn horror films like Hostel (2005), the sight of one of the men dropkicking his neighbor's baby, gets a big laugh. It's the next logical step in the string of increasingly violent gags.

Critics have called McLaren's political commentary simplistic, but how much nuance can you get into eight minutes? For that matter, how much nuance is there in the 95 minutes of Dr. Strangelove? As commentaries on the Cold War, both films are about as complex as they need to be. It's not as if the final slides, using various languages to urge the viewer to "Love Thy Neighbour", demand a rebuttal.

The suspense in Friend Request is brutal.

Can anything break through Alycia Debnam-Carey's placid beauty?

The apocalypse is social in Friend Request (2017), a horror film set against the world of Facebook. The film has a nifty premise. College golden girl Laura (Debnam-Carey) tries to reach out to the outcast Marina (Liesl Ahlers). When Marina gets too clingy, Laura cuts her off, inadvertently driving the girl to suicide. Then the fun begins. Marina's spirit takes over Laura's Facebook account (the social media platform is never mentioned by name, but all of the images are clear imitations of Facebook pages). Marina posts a video of her suicide to Laura's page and then starts driving Laura's friends to suicide and posting those images. In short order, Laura is expelled from college and starts losing friends. As the action unfolds, the status bar from her homepage is superimposed over scenes, showing the friend count dwindling away until it reaches zero.

The premise has a lot going for it. After all, this is the age of social media, good or bad (and sometimes both at the same time). I have friends who use Facebook as an effective marketing tool for their work in the arts. I've used it that way myself. I've even tried using it as a teaching aid (only to discover that videos and articles related to performance theory just can't compete with cute cats and political memes). But I also have friends I had to silence because they posted every song they listened to on Spotify. If you read enough political comments or subscribe to any of the pages on film, you also may share my belief that Facebook is where critical thinking has gone to die. All that's relatively benign, however, compared to social media's use as a vehicle for spreading bigotry and bullying.

So, Friend Request starts with a good idea. One of things attracting Laura to Marina is her art; Marina's Facebook page if filled with intriguing gothic images and animations that give the film's early scenes a great visual spin. And Debnam-Carey isn't a bad actress. Her face may not move a lot, but there's always something going on behind her eyes. The light there is strong enough to register even on television, where she did pretty good work on The 100 and Fear the Walking Dead (the latter after the writers finally decided to give her a character). And just for fun she not only has a hot boyfriend (William Moseley, of the Narnia movies) but also a hot back-up guy (Connor Paolo of Gossip Girl, Revenge and the great 2010 mumble gore flick Stake Land). Once the action gets going, sadly, that's just not enough.

Screenwriters Matthew Ballen, Phillip Koch and Simon Verhoeven (who also directed) give Marina a backstory to explain her outcast status and her ability to haunt Laura's Facebook page. She came from a coven that was destroyed in a fire. Then she went to an orphanage where two boys abused her before meeting their own untimely end. Somewhere in there a hive of wasps got in on the action as well, but I've long since forgotten or blocked the connection. Those three elements — fire, the bullies and wasps — are the main images haunting Laura's friends and driving them to suicide. They're pretty much beaten to death, so instead of the hallucinatory body counts of classic screen killers like Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees, Marina's murders become kind of boring.

The film also commits a cardinal sin in horror. They use Marina's mythology to concoct an expert scheme to end the haunting by social media, and then forget it. Failed attempts to take out the monsters are one thing. One of the best scenes in The Thing From Another World (1951) occurs when they mistakenly try to set the monster on fire. It's a terrifying study in light, shadow, movement and sound. But you can't build a film's climax around an elaborate scheme to find the source of the haunting and destroy it, only to give up the whole thing, which is what Friend Request does. Basically, logic takes a holiday, with an ending that seems intensely dramatic but really doesn't make any sense — the kind of thing high-school sophomores would consider profound until they grew up. Any good will the film has built up, of course, has been completely dispelled by that point, leaving the climax something to laugh at, not with.