Brand Upon the Brain!
Directed by Guy Maddin
Brand Upon the Brain!, Guy Maddin’s umpteenth travesty of silent-movie gimmickry, never quite lapses into rank silliness like Maddin’s atrocious experimental musical, The Saddest Music in the World. Instead, each scene here boasts seriousness. Its primary virtue is that it almost—but not quite—sustains interest to the end.
This semi-autobiographical reverie concerns a young man named Guy Maddin (played as an adult by Erik Steffen Maahs), who returns to his Canadian home, the mysterious Black Notch Island marked by a phallic lighthouse, where he reverts to pubescent panic (portrayed by child actor Sullivan Brown). Maddin’s memory of his hysterical mother’s domination, his reclusive father’s diabolical laboratory experiments and his older sister’s sexual awakening combine with his present-tense adult predicament. This personal story is given the aura of an Expressionist silent horror film. Inter-titles and gauzy black-and-white photography, with occasional color flashes, not only suggest early, primitive filmmaking, but also the pre-history of one’s birth and of psychoanalysis.
Maddin lurches from adult Guy’s repression to young Guy’s neediness, then launches into delirious scenes of transvestite role-confusion, domestic torture, childhood brutality (Black Notch Island has its own Orphanage) and the occult. Almost-passionate filmmaking, its chief emotion is anger—but it’s sub-Kenneth Anger. However, it may just be the perfect recipe for pompous contemporary filmmaking—artsy to the extreme. This probably explains the glitterati (Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery and others) lining up to perform the film’s melodramatic voice-over narration at some of the initial New York live events. (Isabella Rossellini’s recorded narration accompanies regular screenings and the DVD release.)
These gestures toward the avant-garde supposedly make Brand Upon the Brain! an art event, but Maddin’s extremely mannered films are actually rear-guard. He exhibits a Canadian mediocrity, combining derivativeness with gentility. The image of Guy’s sexually frustrated sister (Maya Lawson) wielding a knife, her contorted face shown in a white-and-black reverse-negative, illustrates his routine audacity. This banal copying of the old-fashioned avant-garde prevents Maddin from bursting through status-quo expectations with Buñuel, De Palma or David Lynch’s force. Instead, Maddin dredges up a sentimental, dime-store Freudian approach to sexuality and family dynamics: Guy and his sister live in fear/anticipation of catching their parents “mid-crime”—an intertitle’s polite term for mid-fuck, which becomes an elaborate, grotesquely contrived parental primal scene. Maddin blurs a Frankenstein lab trial with an Adam-and-Eve nightmare.
Brand Upon the Brain! is a weird concoction to put forth in the dumbed-down, ADD, anti-intellectual era. After Mary Jordan’s Jack Smith documentary and the recent DVD release of the 1950 Genet-Cocteau collaboration Un Chant d’Amour, Maddin’s artsiness seems poor indeed, more affected than powerful. Its crazy critical appeal must lie in the messiness of Maddin’s style. (His alter-ego, introduced as a house painter, is shown restoring the old Lighthouse/orphanage—the site of oppression—in crisscross, slapdash strokes similar to Maddin’s own filmmaking.) His chaotic signature is like a brand upon the brain of contemporary film culture, an archetype of bad style: Though shot in 8mm, the film’s hectic editing rhythms are a form of video chic. It derides the exquisite clarity and hypnotic pulse of the great silents.
Audiences who don’t know the silent tradition Maddin mocks (such as Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant) are doomed to overrate his conceits. This is his most thought-through concept since 1992’s Careful—different from his recent dogpile of movie-fixated shorts and fetishistic features like Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. But by the time Maddin’s characters run amok through an atmosphere of madhouse repression and sentimentalized corruption, his hackneyed critique of the family and overwrought silent-movie gambits go nowhere. It defies an audience’s enjoyment. Brand Upon the Brain!’s antique titles and silent-movie devices don’t quite disguise the fact that Maddin’s ideas are shopworn. Sure, they’re half-parodistic—campy exaggerations of civilization’s neuroses—but the funniest thing about them is the demonstration that an artist’s pathetic self-absorption never goes out of fashion, even when it’s second rate.
