Playing with Feu: Quest for Fire

The real Planet of the Apes, Neanderthalensis style.

For four months, I've been at a loss for someone or something to procrastacriticize, until last night, not feeling like doing anything, even sleeping, I found myself watching the answer on netflicks. A movie I saw when it came out and I was a teenager, not paying attention sufficiently for it's lessons about prehistory and evolution to sink in. But I did remember Rae Dawn Chong, that all the dialogue was in a cave-man language invented for the movie, all the scenery natural, and that it was not a musical. Any two of those are enough to make me watch, even if it were not such a contender for Archaeological Training Film status (others of the ilk appear here).

There's not much to complain about with Quest For Fire, even the weird translation of the original Guerre to Quest. Yes, instead of to deserving and starving grad students, the jobs of developing the languages verbal and non for multiple hominid bands went to a celebrity linguist and celebrity ethologist (yes indeed, such creatures exist), but what other feature films even make the effort? Same goes for anthropological inaccuracies.

Now QFF (yeah, I'm gonna start acronymizing it,...makes me feel nerd-cool), for a movie that has high standards for acting and cinematography (for starters), does also have some glaring lapses. The fight with the Wuggaboo tribe, for example, comes off like a farce (the first of many appearances of some of the fakest and poorly deployed "blood" in the 1980s occurs in this scene), complete with the old Batman Show knock-down-three-guys-with-one-log maneuver and platice clubs that are exact replicas of the one wielded by Bam-bam Rubble. Then, lots of close-ups of wolves with rasberry jam (or maybe blood?) on their snarling faces, shot on various film stocks before two huskies finally enter the real scene, chowing on a dish of kibble put right behind a beteljuice-smeared (or, possibly, bloody?) "corpse." These lobos are not only not Dire, they're probably not even a match for the "saber-toothed tigers" (you guessed it, a pair of lassitudinous lions with spray-on stripes and plastic fangs). 

Apparently, fake blood is not considered make-up, because QFF took home the academy award for make-up that year.  Maybe body paint on the more advanced tribe (which caused the guy having to rub it on Ms. Chong every day,  a latent heterosexual, to feel conflicted and uncomfortable) counts as make-up. And I guess the girl with part of her arm cut off ("You don't eat a long-pig that good all at once," as they say) was frighteningly realistic.

What is the most stunning about the make-up Oscar is the little-known fact that the principal actors did not require make-up, having been cast for their browlines. Both were at the beginning of their film careers, and both did a fine job fighting and walking and yelling and grabbing females from behind. The lead was none other than Everett McGill, who was in TV show Twin Peaks as Ed, the guy pining for his high school sweetheart and almost getting her before (as will sometimes happen in a David Lynch story) the spell wears off.

Of course this shot is low-res. It was 80,000 years ago, so I had to do a capture from VHS.

McGill may have been the lead then, but his second-banana turns out to be Ron Perlman. I looked up Mr. Perlman, and that guy has been in more things than any other actor I've seen. And he's not just cast for his Beastly beauty, Neanderthalish brow, and Hellboyish charms, either, he's in video games, and does voice work. Hey Arnold, even. Now, he is best known for being the thug-in-chief emeritus in Sons of Anarchy, however, and brooding beneath that brow didn't hurt his chances landing the role of what is basically a modern cave-man character (Ugh...kill now). The main difference is that his QFF character is repulsed by cannibalism and only does it accidentally. 

One thing about this movie is that only a few people play roles amounting to more than Nameless Tribe Member. In the contrasts between these groups, QFF's vintage betrays itself most clearly. The most primitive group are the Wuggaboos (yeah, another spelling seems to be the "official" way, but transcribing an 80,000-year-old fake language is not as exact as you may think, and my spelling comes closer to the slur-like character the name was bound to have had). And guess what? The most primitive hominids also turn out to be the black ones. Oh, and they're hairy, too. It's becoming less common these days to be so overtly and clumsily racist, but making fun of the hirsute in their hairsuits is just as accepted now as it was then. Alas.

Then there's the cannibal tribe, who appear to be more or less Scottish, or maybe Irish,...some kind of violent redheaded stereotype. One rung up from African, in 20th Century "Reason," but not up to par with the heroes' tribe, which the internet seems to agree were Neanderthals. QFF manages, within the Neanderthals, to bring in an element of hair-snobbery by reversing the Wuggaboo effect: the guy whose character arc goes from nerd-we-will-trust-with-fire to buffoon to scapegoat is the only bald guy in the movie. Only losers go bald, as we all know.

Then there are the more advanced Cro-Mags, with their body paint, variety of sexual positions (including one the women might even enjoy!?), intoxicants, and out of control laughter. In fact, if it weren't for the advanced weaponry and monochrome body paint pallette, they would appear to be hippies. And in the spirit of love and acceptance, they're the only multi-racial group of the movie. Oh, and they know how to make fire. 

Fire will dawn (as soon as he let's her handle the stick properly).

So the Quest meets with success. And we all learn something. Mammoths respond to little gestures of kindness. Australopithecenes and Neanderthals may fall into racist stereotypes, but modern humans are diverse (beneath their uniformly black and grey paint). Living with fire is better than living without it, especially on tiny bog islands (and the corrolary: if fire is that important, maybe you should get the hell out of the swamp). People with too much or too little hair are bad. Technology makes life better (or at least it did until the atlatl set of an arms race that is not yet done, but I think  that's more my opinion than QFF's). Getting hit in the head with a rock is funny. And, to step outside the story for a moment, that good actors keep their real names (Chong, McGill, Perlman, I salute you all) and can still have a decent career.

I am glad I learned so much watching Quest For Fire this time around. I feel like it has made me a better archaeologist, and just maybe a better fake critic. Maybe in another 30 years or so I can watch it again, and learn something new. I'll post if I do.

3 Generations of Blue Steel

One of the best things about losing touch with Classic Rock radio is that I don't have to hear the Doors slam the coffin shut on psychedaelia. Their nauseating drone of pretense! Tonight, I happened to hear "Don't You Love Her Madly" and hated it happily, pointing out to the girls that it is nothing but a ham-handed mash-up of music from one of those phony old-timey ice cream parlors and a barbiturated lounge singer.

James T. Morrison, actin' all deep and groovy and shit.

Mr. Morrison, front man extraordinaire, even said he was the Lounge Lizard King ("Lounge" was silent, but implied), and he is correct. Had he lived, he would be splitting his time between Atlantic City and Branson, always wearing giant shades to hide shame's bloat, driving away musicians and yet continuing to score groupies with his trademark blend of booze and abuze. 

He didn't live (and thus stayed young and famous while his peers became crones), but even a dead guy can stare out of print and pixels into the eyes of human hordes years later, enticing them to look up his fauxlosophical lyrics and poetry. He was photogenic, if nothing else, and in posession of a fine sense of how to make a silly gesture seem deep, like in the shot above. You may also notice that he's got the soft proto-70's version of the Blue Steel pout. The Lounge Lizard King lives not more, but Jim Morrison Male Model achieved immortality.

Henry Garfield by Thurston Howes. Check out his  gallery o punk photos.

Modeling involves posing, and one thing punks hate is a poser.* Actually, no, that's not true. It's just that the band had to have more that one pose, and it wasn't about being pretty; Blue Steel would not have cut it on stage. A singer in particular had to have a series of poses directed at the other players, the audience, and imaginary oppressors. Henry Rollins was pretty good at that, but could also be insufferable. The kind of guy who would pose with a book so people would see him and then he could tell them what it means (instead of reading it), or write about He Himself and what He thinks.**

Like Morrison, Rollins loves having cameras on him. Not being a druggie alcoholic, he lives to do it to this day, in a manner I've posted on before. He poses even when not on stage, like with his Blue Steely gaze above, shirtless and one shoulder dropped, just like he did as a kid in front of his Doors poster, alone in his room dreaming of being a star). But in all those years it's hard to find a candid shot. Frame after frame he poses, so we won't forget his face. Line after line he proses, so we can grok his enlightenment. Track after track he chooses, so we're immersed in his sensibility.

I guess now I am too old and unhip (a word that proves my point, I think) to know who is this generation's self-adulating intellectually pretentious pretty boy of music. But I do know who Derek Zoolander is: he's the man who perfected the look that Morrison and Rollins only approximated.

And that's not all he perfected. By throwing himself whole-facedly into his modeling career, jettisoning the need to be loved for his mind as well as his really really good looks, Zoolander became a better model than Henry or Jim, and way less annoying. Not for the inventor of Magnum to write pretentious crap, or to whip out a tome to be seen reading the right stuff. All he wanted was for the school for kids who don't read good to be big enough for them to fit in. A simple man, a grounded dream. Isn't that enough to ask of our models and our musician-models and model-musicians?



* I know, poseur is the 'real' spelling, but people who insist on that brand themselves with it.

** Like me, now. Dammit, I'm a fraud.***

*** But there is this silver lining: Now I can claim to be a legit critic.