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.

Front Man Capitalism: Precrastacriticizing Henry Rollins

The Magnificent Creature known as Henry Rollins, bottom (Artist's conception by Coop)

Henry Rollins is a comin' to town soon, which means I should review the show several years from now, but this time I'm going precrastacritic, because I ain't going to the show anyway. May as well pre-judge (as per childhood religious training).

The reason I won't go see this icon of American Hardcore punk, this spokesman for the outsiders, is that he's gonna charge more than I've ever paid to see anything in Olympia, and has the gall to call his tour "Capitalism," in which he goes to the capital of each state (get it!? Pure Henry Gold) and talks about the injustices of capitalism that he has seen in his world travels.

People my age came to know Henry as the singer of Blag Flag, a seminal band which became that way under Dez, but hit punk fame (translation, suburban demi-rebels like myself were able to buy the album) when Damaged hit the record stores, overwrought Henry photo on the cover (he's punching a mirror!). Then he had to have a band named for himself, showed up on a bunch of cable shows and the movie blockbuster Jackass, did whatever it took to make a living without ending up as the burger flipper he sometimes says he was set up to be. 

But instead, he's a "spoken word artist," a phrase that, when translated from it's native Capitalistian, means, "I don't like sharing the take with a band, and I'm more of a visionary/poet/raconteur than a musician."

And I am supposed to pay five times what I would pay for a Fugazi show to take in this one guy, no smarter than Ian for sure, and without the music. He did promise Capitalism, so I guess I shouldn't complain.What sucks is the "I'm with the proletariat" conceit. I watched the video linked to at the calendar that announces hi Olympia show, sitting through  11 excruciating minutes of him talking about how his free-spiritedness and tough upbringing made him qualified to work in the service industry at minimum wage, and thus is my brother.

Bullshit, Henry Garfield (yup, Rollins is a made-up name). Were you street-wise, or a student at the elite Bullis School? Were you earning your blue collar cred while working at a Haagen Dazs ice cream store back when the name meant luxury to the rich, and a complete blank to the rest of us? You like to talk about how close you are to the edge, but you say you've been on tour more than 100 days this year, each time a few hundred people paying 25 bucks a pop to hear you claim that you're just a poor working stiff. 

But you're not cleaning piss in a public nursing facility, and you are not flipping burgers or even slinging yuppie ice cream. You are, as you mostly have been, starring in the Henry Show. Appearing and voicing over, DJ-ing and blogging. Lots of it at henryrollins.com (not .org, .net, or even .us, but .com, just to be clear), where the rest of us can also buy t-shirts with the Henry birth-date emblazoned on them, again for the low low price of $25. Ignoring for the moment the creepy cult-of-personality vibe of selling stuff celebrating the Adored One's date of issue, I'm sure that the reason the shirts cost so much is that they are made in a unionized American factory. 

To harp on the website a moment longer: why is Capitalism so much more evident than that there Freedom you claim to love and defend? The "Dispatch" blog allows no comment, no democratic feedback, and when I get to the "Contact" page, most of the addresses are for money stuff. The approach seems to be, "I am Henry. Now shut up and listen. Or buy something." I wonder too, how far your internet power extends, since I posted an abbreviated rant of this sort at the Olympia Film Society's page announcing your show, only to have it never appear.(Maybe there will be something tomorrow...I tried again.)

However, I do get to see this poster, featuring you as Uncle Sam, co-opting our nation's most scoldy icon to sell tickets. Clever, very clever. And better than that "I copied it from Johnny Rotten" crazy-eyed stare you do; the Uncle Sam pose demonsrates your versatility. Also, it's a welcome relief from the muscle guy stances you seem to favor, looking like Napoleon's Uncle Rico, only meaner. 

Meanwhile, you are making your way here as I pre-criticize. Honolulu to Anchorage to Olympia, and you've traveled all over in months and years preceding. Ergo the "Dispatches" trope on your .com website. We imagine tuning in to read your tales of exotic travel, global humanity, and regional complexities. But mostly there are plugs for your radio show and appearances. Since I know something about Honolulu, I was happy to see you posting from there, but was disappointed to see you only plug away and write boringly about the logistics of traveling shows. There was no there there. Not even any Henry there. If you just wanna phone it in, give up the blog and tweet.

The people who do go see you will enjoy it, probably ($25 is a powerful inducement to feign satisfaction for most of us, Henry). Hell, I enjoyed Black Flag (most recently a half hour ago, on the original vinyl), and actually would rather abide a show-boating, only slightly ripping-me-off guy who speaks out against corporate corruption than most of the alternatives. 

But your being a disingenius is bothersome. Why not admit you were born weller-off than many, that your service-working years were spent in an upscale establishment, or that maybe you got the gig with Black Flag because you had the resources and the parental indulgence to goto NY city to be at their shows for nights on end? People with publicists and booking agents are not your garden variety proles. It's OK, I'm too old and too employed by a state government to call you a Sellout. And if you priced your shows a bit more like Fugazi, I'd probably be among the appreciative crowd.

Nemesis: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Ready, set, steal!

Even for a procrastinator, I've put off facing off with my nemesis long enough. So long I had to rent the movie to remember anything beyond the melting nazi (but not enough after that to suppress memory once more). Enough years between release and review for me to have kids who can mock the old-timeyness of the production values and special effects. Nearly long enough for the movie to meet the federal threshold for being historic.

Until such time as archaeologists can officially start considering the locations (AD 2031), they must satisfy themselves with the film. Raiders sits proudly astride the canon of Archaeology Training Films, if only because we cannot avoid it, along with Planet of the Apes (for the second smartest character in the movie, an archaeologist chimp, and of course for the material culture images from another branch of the primate evolutionary tree), Platoon (for the jungle-stalking hand gestures), and,...and some other stuff.

Archaeologists cannot escape Dr. Jones. People always ask where my whip is (I got your bullwhip right here, buddy), and about the hardest thing this non-conformist ever did was buy a hat that vaguely resembles what everyone thinks I am supposed to wear. [For the record, it is a locally made Filson, whose rain-shedding sun-shading excellence makes the inevitable calls of "Hey, Indiana!" bearable.] Most Americans, and plenty of the rest of the world at this late date, know about as much about archaeology from the Indiana Jones movies as from anywhere else.

From the base of excavation to the top of the ivory tower, we archaeologists cringe at what the public thinks of us based on these blockbuster figments. Other than chrono-stupidity of biblical proportions ("Hey, you finding any dinosaurs?"), the perception that archaeologists hunt treasure ranks high among our existential banes. An interesting thing about the movie (oh yeah, I'm supposed to be writing a movie review) is that the protagonist is in fact presented as a procurer-for-hire, an expert in the occult, and to the extent he is a professor of archaeology at all, it is only so that he may cause coeds to swoon until he is called out on feats of daring-do. Neither 'raider' nor 'occulticist' has yet made it onto the list of sub-disciplines recognized by academe, and the fact that this flick shows him being recruited by spooks (who inexplicably demand to hold a top-secret conversation ins a large echo-ey hall) absolutely hammers home that Indy is to get the goods before the Germans, not stop and take notes, screen all the dirt, and all that other boring shit. Under no circumstances is he to waste time mapping a site, other than to find treasure. [Ahh, treasure, the worst of archaeotropes.]

There is, of course, a love interest, as is so often not the case for dedicated shovelbums, nomad-ing their way through their region of choice, living in cheap motels and on cheapskates' checks. No, it is not one of the college girls. Indiana Jones needs something more complex and mature than that: his professor's daughter. Who, I was surprised to learn upon consulting imdb, is not played by Deborah Winger. No, it is Karen Allen, who to my knowledge has never posed for a magazine spread french-kissing a dog, which helps distinguish her from Deb. Whoever it is, the character turns out to be a far more accurate take on an archaeologist man's mate: she can drink her weight in the alcohol of any nation, she looks good in a dress but prefers more practical wear, and she can hold her own in a fight. Come to think of it, those are also the qualifications for a pirate's girlfriend.

At this point in this post, I cannot see the sense in trying to summarize the action or the plot, or to aim for literary criticism. What's the value in pointing out that Natives are portrayed as bloodthirsty, Mestizos as duplicitous, African skippers as good-hearted slave-traders, and Arab shovelbums as cowardly buffoons? Or plodding my way through the large data set of un-archaeological actions, noting each and every professional and technical objection? [OK, maybe just one: after uttering the most hilarious line he gets--"Belloq's staff is too long"--Indy uses a staff that is even longer still, based on the units specified on the Staff of Ra, yet I am asked to suspend disbelief... Oh yeah, that's some prime geek-crit there.]

Belloq, the obligatory nemesis. Like all European stereotypes deployed for this film--the Frenchman is a conniving lightweight, the Nazi is enamored with sado-masochistic coat-hangers--his is entirely accurate. A bad guy not because he steals priceless cultural heritage, but because he steals it for the wrong people. At least he managed to convince those wrong people to make a pit stop on some island to engage in a fake Jewish ritual so that Indy and his androgynously-monikered Marion could have a conversation while tied up together, just before denouement. Unlike most US presidents, I have decided that the nemesis of my nemesis is not my friend.

Oh, Doc Jones, what am I to make of you? The franchise eventually had archaeologists doing all sorts of offensive things, from using femurs for torches to enrolling a spunky kid and an addled Sean Connery in his adventures. Oh, and most of all, making Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...unforgivable. Snatching treasure you don't need, Harrison?

But on the other hand, there's Indiana Jones, making archaeology cool. Had Hollywood inexplicably portrayed archaeologists doing what they normally do: digging slowly, taking notes, spending untold hours weighing, illustrating, researching and writing,...if they'd showed all that, nobody would think our job is interesting. And Indiana Jones hates nazis, like most archaeologists; that's a good thing.

So yeah. Raiders of the Lost Ark kicked off one of those sprees that alters culture, that casts a type so solidly the populace cannot escape. Archaeologists are stuck with Indiana Jones like Nixon had Rich Little and comedians have Seinfeld. [Yes, there are more up-to-date analogs, but dammit, I am an archaeologist.]