The Road to Son of Paleface, 3

Well, you know, I spent a long time doing cartoons. Finally, I just lost interest in it. So I thought — what can I do? Be an agent, a gagman, a writer. I went into writing. Then, a few years later, I wrote a picture called The Paleface. After seeing the preview of it, I could've shot Norman McLeod. I'd written it as a satire on The Virginian, and it was completely botched. I could've killed that guy. And I realized then that I must direct my own stuff.

- Frank Tashlin, interview with Peter Bogdanovich, 1962

I've seen no information on Son of Paleface's production aside from the none-too-convincing publicity photo caption on the right. The script's progress, however, is documented at the Academy library.

As intellectual property, the "original story" Robert L. Welch registered in early March, 1951 compares well to most software patents. It can be summarized as "Paleface was a hit, My Little Chickadee had a plot, and Roy Rogers is available."

In late April, Welch and Joseph Quillan delivered a bulkier treatment. Their mish-mash of received storylines now included one which made it to the finished product — the local Native American community's thirst for vengeance — although it speaks well for Hollywood quality control that such proposed character names as "Chief Yellow Feather" and "Little Big Horn" were dropped. At this point the comedy is stocked with sure-fire laugh-getters like stranglings, knifings, and a bent shotgun shooting injuns over the shoulder. Even so, the authors' invention flagged: at the end there's a big chase, and "Then Bob Hope leaves for a series of personal appearances in Minneapolis."

Tashlin's name first appears on the June 8 draft. There's still an overly complicated snarl of characters, but Junior's sexual and filial neuroses and the peculiar loyalty of old Hank (later to be old Ebeneezer) are settled, along with many cartoony sight gags and a twisted revision of the first movie's hit song, "Buttons & Bows."

By the end of June, Tashlin has completely restructured the film, complete with a real ending, albeit not the one finally used. (The ghost of Potter's father nuzzles Jane Russell. JUNIOR: "I don't understand this. Crosby always gets the girl!") Most tangles are gone except for some unnecessary complexity in Jane Russell's motivation. (In this version, Potter père and his partner had stolen a gold mine from Russell's father, shot him, tripped him, and pushed him over a cliff.) A stage direction explains the train of thought which led to one of the film's more elaborate non-sequitur gags: "JUNIOR is in a large barrel bathing in the coy manner of all the deMille bathtub heroines."

At the end of July, the Breen Office unleashed its righteous wrath. Most of the excised material must have been written with some knowledge of its likely fate:

LILY: Darling, you look so warm. Let me loosen your tie.
JUNIOR: All right. Just don't loosen my belt. I'm liable to break a toe.

LILY: (Caressing his face) Darling, how smooth your skin is!
JUNIOR: There's plenty more where that came from, baby!

JUNIOR turns from keyhole.
JUNIOR: Hold on, friends -- in my excitement I swallowed the doorknob.

... and, sadly, the payoff of Junior's "kaboodle talk":

... what with havin' to sashay mah mavericks an' sagebrushing mah dogies an' brandin' mah stray buckboards till I'm plumb ornery... an' I ain't had mah ornery plumbed since I left Harvard.

Unsurprisingly, the Office also insisted on censoring all hints of homosexuality or bestiality. But despite their confident assertions — "As you know, such a passage could not be approved in the finished picture," "Junior's dialogue is unacceptable for obvious reasons" — Tashlin ignored every one of these requests. A Junior Potter without sexual confusion would have no character at all. The single damaging cut accepted by Tashlin (leaving the prenuptial scene short on gags) was comparatively innocuous:

LILY: I think I'll go and freshen up, dear.
JUNIOR: (Anxiously) Hurry back before the Reverend Mr. Schwartz gets here... Just think, pretty soon we'll be three... counting Schwartz... and then, in a year or two, who knows... maybe Schwartz will have a son.

Did they fear a reverend with children might offend Catholics?

Kick him when you're down

Since I know some readers share my interest in the sub-subgenre of academic endnotes, I'd like to share the belated highlight of Lee Zimmerman's "Against Depression: Final Knowledge in Styron, Mairs, and Solomon", Biography 30.4 (2007):

17. Noonday Demon's website — www.noondaydemon.com/biography — announces it "has won . . . fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and is being published in 22 languages. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list in both hardback and paperback; it has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries. Among the honors garnered by The Noonday Demon are the Books for a Better Life Award, the Ken Award of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the QPB New Visions Award, the Voice of Mental Health award of the Jed Foundation and the National Mental Health Association, the Lammy for the best nonfiction of 2001, the Mind Book of the Year for Great Britain, the Prism Award of the NDMDA, the Charles T. Rubey LOSS award, the Silvano Arieti Award, the Dede Hirsch Community Service Award, and the Erasing The Stigma Leadership Award. It was chosen an American Library Association Notable Book of 2001 and a New York Times Notable Book. . . . Mr. Solomon has lectured on depression around the world, including recent stints at Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress." The collection of those offering high praise in book-jacket blurbs is especially high-powered: Styron, Harold Bloom, Louise Erdrich, Larry McMurtry, Naomi Wolf, Adam Gopnik, and Kay Redfield Jamison.

18. The book's claim to mastery has been widely accepted. In a New York Times book review, Richard Bernstein writes: "'The Noonday Demon' is one of those rare volumes that deserve the adjective 'definitive.'"

19. See, for example, works by J. B. Harley and by Jeremy Black.

20. It is tempting to regard this infliction upon the reader in light of what Solomon calls his "several episodes of violence" against other people (179). In one such episode, feeling "cruelly betrayed" by someone he "loved very much," Solomon "attacked him . . . threw him against a wall, and socked him repeatedly, breaking both his jaw and his nose. He was later hospitalized for loss of blood."

21. In considering Solomon's representation of antidepressant medication, I should make mention of an unusual circumstance that Solomon only hints at. He does acknowledge that "It is hard for me to write without bias about the pharmaceutical companies because my father has worked in the pharmaceutical field for most of my adult life," and that "His company, Forest Laboratories, is now the U.S. distributor of Celexa" (13). But such cautious phrasing omits significant information that would seem to bear on the question of possible "bias." Since 1977, Howard Solomon has been the CEO, and since 1998 the CEO and Chairman, of Forest Labs, and according to Business Week in May 2002, "since its U.S. launch in September, 1998, Celexa has come to account for almost 70% of Forest's overall sales — about $1.6 billion in the fiscal year that ended on Mar. 31" (Berfield 74). (Forest now also produces another major antidepressant, Lexapro.) For 2005, the Forbes list of the most highly paid CEOs of American companies ranks him as fourth, with a compensation for that year of $92,115,000; for the five-year period ending that year, his compensation is listed as $294,895,000 ("Executive Pay").

(Should anyone now be nervously eyeing their melancholic loved ones, please be assured that bloody fisticuffs are not a typical symptom of depression — although, as I recall, fury is a side-effect of some antidepressants....)

The Road to Son of Paleface, 4

The people who are doing cartoons today are basing them on The Flintstones. That was the nadir: cartoons disappearing as cartoons and becoming radio shows.

- Joe Dante, interview with Bill Krohn, Frank Tashlin, ed. Roger Garcia, 1994

Bob Hope is a good radio comedian with a pleasing presence, but not much more, on the screen. There is no hope that screen comedy will get much better than it is without new gifted young comedians who really belong in movies, and without freedom for their experiments.

- James Agee, "Comedy's Greatest Era", 1949

According to Tashlin, while Hope grumbled about playing "a rabbit" when they first worked together on The Lemon Drop Kid, he meekly complied with every outrage in Son of Paleface. I wonder if between the two productions Hope (or his agent) had read Agee's tribute to silent film comics, whose final section used The Paleface as a whipping-boy. Certainly, there's no way Hope could've missed the cartoonishness of this vehicle: everyone mentions it, beginning with Tashlin himself.

Less often mentioned is the extent to which it fails. Tashlin's gag-writing habits developed in tandem with the wild-assed animation techniques needed to support them. If Tashlin had made the transition to live film earlier, such experimentation might've been given a chance — in the rich man's Ufa, for example — but post-1940 Hollywood frowned on moving cameras and off-the-bias shots. Presented full-face with anonymous cinematography and editing, Tashlin's most blatantly "cartoony" gags become his draggiest: the movie halts, waiting for the effect to effect itself. Attempts to goose the tempo through undercranking seem a miserable defeat compared to the lightning fluidity of Daffy Duck.

Junior's reaction to his father's cocktail is less Elmer-Fuddy than Eraserhead-ish.

Instead, the effective absurdities are the ones which exaggerate live-action convention: the over-aged leading man; the tormented son-father relationship; ingenious tactics exercised against overwhelming odds.... And the most celebrated shot of the film would've actually been less powerful in a "real" cartoon: Trigger's bedroom scene works because of its gross, almost reeking, physicality and its nightmarishly deliberate pacing — like a Pasolini comedy that's funny, if you can imagine such a thing.

Wednesday Sex: A Pornstructuralist Reader

Some years ago, I sampled a selection of pornographic fiction. As you might expect, it tended either toward the episodic or toward something not much like porn. Alexander Trocchi wrote the exceptions. Although his "ambitious" works sloshed like bags in a stagnant river, hacking out smut roused an otherwise dormant gift for long narrative: 1955's White Thighs and 1956's Thongs are built like novels.

In terms of genre, the one is dom/sub; the other's S&M. But White Thighs' perky dungeon is a far cry from Pat Califia's pragmatic naturalism and a closer cry to the fantasy scenes of 8 1/2, and I think we can agree that Fellini's neighborhood, distressing as it is, is best labeled vanilla male heterosexuality.

More abstractly, the two novels differ by the merest shift in motive force. Lust generates story by making us act like idiots. From that rich bubbling crude of gloryhallastoopid, White Thighs slightly emphasizes coupling's imperious loss of will:

"They have no more problems. They don't exist. Each day they become more like the animals they always longed to be.... no wonder they love you, Saul!"

Whereas Thongs slightly emphasizes the more solipsistic telescoping loss of proportion:

"Once the leap out of the self has been made, it is an anticlimax to go back."

1955 was a good year for wicked books. Like sibling Lolita, White Thighs roots its perversion in childhood ecstasy-trauma; like The Talented Mr. Ripley, its hero ascends consequence-free on wings of amorality. But don't let those comparisons or Trocchi's "poet"-studded blurbs mislead you. While he's capable of a telling image, here he mostly coasts by on rampant members and pulsing bellies. In his rush, the author once even seems to lose track of just whose implement he's tracking: "the one who was ever present in my belly like a dark pencil of lust."

The virtue (you should pardon the expression) of White Thighs lies not on its verbal skin but in its architectonics. Trocchi's coasting accelerates consumption as well as production; the weighty hyperfocus of a Marco Vassi would have slowed and finally fractured the book. Desire's absurd muddle of control and abandon — we want the other to want that we want that they want that this that was — is here split into an efficient cycle of surrender, disappointment, and manipulation that drives the story steadily upwards — I picture a rotary engine surrounded by flaps of sticky plastic — to a shaggy-dog punchline. I almost never draw the book from its shelf without finishing it; I almost never put it back without a smirk.

Thongs is another story, more ornately worked and ranging farther. After the traditional "John Ray Jr" prologue, it launches from a grotesque Glasgow slum with a thoroughly anti-erotic razor battle between a thug and his son; it bumps down onto a Spanish estate on the way to a new Golgotha.

Masochism-unto-death (with a female protagonist, ça va sans dire) is a common enough conceit for artsy porn, and the Black Mass and other parodies of Catholic ritual are common enough ornaments, but Trocchi elaborates and entwines them to uncommon extremes:

"Each Pain Cardinal has six Grand Painmasters under him, and they in turn have each twelve Painmasters or Painmistresses under them. Thus, you see that you are one of eight hundred and sixty-four Painmasters or Painmistresses.... If you were chosen as a Grand Painmistress while I was still in your service, you would have the choice of taking me with you as your secretary or of accepting the secretary of the ex-Grand Painmistress. In one sense his services would be an advantage since he would be already acquainted with all the customary forms pertaining to his master's office, but that can be learned and I don't suppose it's necessary to point out to you that a man who has risen with you is likely to prove more loyal."

From those elements, he builds an up-from-the-gutter success-with-regrets story, a reworking of the ancient struggle between orthodox hierarchy and mystic saint (with a Last Temptation-like twist in the tail), and an enduring stroke book for those who seek strokes. Not restricted to the three-chord riff that drives White Thighs home, Thongs' varied transitions all recircle to its fixed idea of consummation — an idea fixed in the reader's mind long before the heroine's, thanks to that prologue. If I finally find I have less to say about the later novel, that may be because it's more articulate on its own behalf.

He buried his face in my neck. What a child! Should I mother him? Is that what he really desires?

I thought not.

The Road to Son of Paleface, 5

Q: In your writing for both cartoons and features, did you draw any line between possible and impossible gags?
A: It depends on who does the gag.

- Frank Tashlin, interview with Mike Barrier, 1971

I think one of the reasons you invest yourself in characters is: who plays them? When he was doing a Bob Hope vehicle, he could have Bob Hope carry the movie, because everybody knew Bob Hope and the kind of stuff he did, and he'd be able to use that.... It's just that he's not afraid to take them a little further than people were used to being taken at that time.

- Joe Dante, interview with Bill Krohn, Frank Tashlin, ed. Roger Garcia, 1994

To the promised land of feature film Tashlin carried assets of self-awareness, anxiety, and vulgarity: an ability not just to tap the repressed, but to hand it the reins. Hope's stardom mixed two inherently unstable comic staples: the wise-cracking fool and the feckless letch. By exaggerating both to previously (and thereafter) unimagined levels, Tashlin achieved the comedian's apotheosis. And, as Mel Gibson taught us, apotheosis is a painful process.

Macaroni supreme, Junior Potter presents something more bizarre than puffed-up cowardice. Outrageous camping combines with eye-bulging homophobia; expressions of randiness are compulsive, somewhere between a tic and a fit, but seem unattached to any thought of consummation. From observation of his Harvard classmates, he knows lust calls for leering and predatorial behavior and he knows it involves some division between men and women, but I'm not sure he knows precisely what that is. Literally dozens of gags concern sexual panic.

His confusion overflows into the script at large. Jane Russell's character (renamed from "Lily" to "Mike") promises, "As soon as I get him under a full moon, I'll empty his father's chest," and it's positioned as a laugh line — but meaning what exactly? Another irrationally-numbered entendre closes the film.

As Junior proudly declares, "I'm a novelty." Where does such a creature come from?

A line of arrested-development "Juniors" stretches across Tashlin's career from the legged-egg of "Booby Hatched" to the frustrated boss of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? The original Paleface ended with its hero losing his bride-to-be before their wedding night, and although it's probably sanest not to consider that film as sharing its sequel's universe, Junior Potter comes close to androgenesis. The ghost of his legendary father — the lyin'est crookedest mangiest rottenest low-down critter that never drew a sober breath — literally haunts the movie. Whereas all we know of his mother is that Senior disinherited her and that she assigned Junior a gender at age twelve, two years after he kissed a girl (and darn if he ain't ready again).

... begotten by Despair / Upon Impossibility.

But the queerest, feyest thing about Junior is the extent to which his queerness escapes notice. Despite the extremest efforts of Edith Head's costume department and Technicolor's saturated reds, every character in the film accepts Potter at face value as just a dude with an inheritance.

What Bob Hope had to add to Donald Duck's sputter and Daffy Duck's self-awareness was fear. Not fear of death so much as the self-devouring fear of humiliation, of being found out. And left unremarked that fear swells to universal proportions: isn't everything as empty and arbitrary as he suspects himself to be? Junior isn't just an intrusion of fantasy; he's the sole recognizer of fantasy. When the film's title is announced, and when de Mille puts in his cameo, Hope conveys a metaphysical perplexity as anguished as Kleist's. He alone grasps the implications of the singing cowboy's hippophilia and he alone considers "Mike" "a pretty masculine handle for such a feminine pot of goodies." When he cautions a character not to repeat a shtick from an earlier scene, his admonishment is blankly accepted, no curiosity, no questions asked. He's the guy who knows the score, but no one's interested in the game.

Long before Junior's horseless carriage set forth, galli, berdaches, hijira, and sangomas blazed a path from ambiguous alienation and ambiguous knowledge to ambiguous power. Michael Ripinsky-Naxon describes three phases of shamanic initiation:

1. Androgyny and adornment 1
2. Administration of hallucinogenic preparations, with "an echo of a strong sexual tenor permeating all aspects of the trance" 2
3. A journey on which one meets a "power animal" who "may even become the shaman's spiritual spouse" 3

While the parallels to Son of Paleface are striking, Tashlin's conclusion more directly addresses a fellow satirist, Andrew Marvell:

When a gift for fantasy becomes dependent on a hypocritical system of fantasy, betrayal and complicity entwine. To the lasting offense of right-thinking critics everywhere, Tashlin, unlike most movie-makers, grappled openly with that dilemma. We're all in the same boat, but conscience demanded he at least admit there's a boat here and water underneath. In Hope's other solo vehicles, his character was walked through some pretense of "redemption" before receiving benediction from the plotline; Tashlin instead rewards Junior's decision to, all right, then, go to Hell.

In a world where nothing rings true, anything is permitted. Boy gets girl in extremis, when she fully recognizes his supernatural (or supergeneric) abilities. And the very next — the next-to-last — gag, prurient and nonsensical at the same time, is an extravagant reminder of the characters' encasement by Hollywood film.

All Junior knows is what the movies show him, and he knows that can't be right. But one has to live.

... Or Your Money Back

Tagline of a full-page back-cover advertisement for a novel titled The Orc King:

They Saved Dickinson's Brain

The one part of Raymond Tallis's polemic I left uncheered was its Axis-of-Evil association of neuroscience-based foolishness with "Theory"-based foolishness. The intersection of "writers classified as Theory" and "writers I follow" offers no support, and most cognitive-aesthetics bosh I've seen was written by Theory-bashers. (Unless I count. I don't count, do I? ... do I?)

Well, I haven't been following Sabine Sielke, who's just transported Derrida's structural trademark "I wrote these words on a bar napkin last night so they must be very important but I can't for the life of me remember why" into a new era:

What, then, does it mean to "re-cognize Dickinson"? And why re-cognize the poet in the first place? ... In some way, we have always been — and cannot help — re-cognizing Emily Dickinson.

I look forward to her take on re-ader re-sponse studies.

But given the essay's many admiring citations of Camille Paglia, we might still need a broader label for that brush. How about "foolishness at large"?

The Road from Son of Paleface

Hurry up; this is impossible.

- Junior Potter, Son of Paleface, 1952

Although Son of Paleface made money, Paramount didn't extend Tashlin's option. His next break came in 1955 when he managed to squeak under Hal Wallis's stringently low standards, and incidentally provided Jerry Lewis's first inkling that cinema could be a worthwhile medium.

Hope fell back to familiar (if depleted) ground. No more panicked thoughts of escape; the animal had become reconciled to its cage, unresponsive to prod or thrown trash. When he turned to the camera, it was in search of cue cards. Six years later Hope reprised the watered-down Western parody of Norman Z. McLeod, who Tashlin never did get around to killing. The final stop of interest is 1960's The Facts of Life, a grim comedy of re-failed-marriage in which Hope's forced unfunniness worked as stark naturalism.

Tashlin meanwhile found a way out of his pacing issues, not by accelerating the gags but by integrating them with the mise en scène. In his best pictures, even ontological intrusions fit into an overall rhythm — the snapping point intermission of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, the choreographed walks of The Girl Can't Help It, Jerry Lewis's shtick-till-I-drop slow a-goh-nee.... After Son of Paleface, Tashlin redirected his satire from the bad habits of dying genres to those of the movie mainstream: juvenile delinquency, gray flannel angst, and most notoriously the overstated but under-remarked bosoms of the era, which, especially in Rock Hunter, seemed to embody a miserable oscillation between the devalued real and the alluring purported.

His best pictures were intermittant, though, and their generation brief. After being tossed between the Scylla of Doris Day and the Charybdis of Lewis, a stormweary Tashlin vanished beneath the waves in 1968, Bob Hope aboard the wreck.

I have always thought that the most fitting way for an American man to die is in a brutal accident on the freeway. Because that way he will be giving up the ghost in a rare moment of freedom.

- Frank Tashlin, interview with Robert Benayoun, 1964

Rich as are the gifts of the imagination bitterness of world's loss is not replaced thereby. On the contrary it is intensified, resembling thus possession itself. But he who has no power of the imagination cannot even know the full of his injury.

- William Carlos Williams, Prologue to Kora in Hell, 1918