The Great Movies III

His graphic novels have undeniable energy and a visual style that depends on meticulous command of the divide between portrait and caricature. We see his pen at work, we see the materials that inspire some of his images, we see him giving a drawing lesson to his teenage son, Jesse. He is one of those artists whose pen stroke is instantly identifiable as his own. His subjects are not superheroes or comic characters (although Crumb reveals that as a child he masturbated to Bugs Bunny). They are lonely, disenfranchised, pimply, unpopular-all the things we sense Crumb was when he was "the most unpopular kid in high school." In some of his most loathsome caricatures, Crumb is still settling scores with bullies from his adolescence and girls who turned him down.

Yet the women who knew him best seem fond of him, especially his first wife, Dana, and current wife, Aline, who see him (as we do in the film) as a smart and entertaining companion who has transformed his demons into his work. Yes, he has sexual hang-ups, but not ones they find unpleasant or painful. Researching Crumb's fetishes for isolated body parts, especially feet, buttocks, and breasts, Zwigoff visits Dian Hanson, the editor of the Juggs and Leg Show magazines, who attributes her publishing success to the fact that she actually reads the letters from her readers.

She arranges a fantasy session for Crumb and some of her models, but this scene doesn't work; for Crumb, the point is not realizing his fantasies, but displacing them into obsessive visual caricatures. In this process some of his work becomes a critique of the same values Deirdre English deplores. If pornography dehumanizes and objectifies, then perhaps that is the point of the Crumb story (shown in detail) about a woman whose neck ends with a peg on which a mannequin head can be attached? She is otherwise functional in all the ways Crumb's hero desires. The strip has a shocking climax, when the hero discovers his woman is not without a head after all; it has been shoved down inside her neck, and when it emerges, the woman has a great deal to complain about. Such a work is disgusting and depraved at the same time it is satirical and subversive; it is an overdose of sexism, inspiring not desire but disgust. It is also, let us be honest, satirical in a dark and scary way.

Crumb's art and career would define the limits of this film if it had been made by someone else. What deepens Zwigoff's work are the scenes with the family members. There is in Charles such a gentle sadness, such a resigned acceptance of his emotional imprisonment, that we sense how Robert's art has saved him from a similar destiny. In the fondness of his wives and girlfriends, there is a redemption to be sensed. As the film ends, Crumb is moving with his family to the south of France, where in recent years he has not produced so much, perhaps because, let us speculate, he is happier.

ark City by Alex Proyas resembles its great silent predecessor Metropolis in asking what it is that makes us human, and why it cannot be changed by decree. Both films are about false worlds created to fabricate ideal societies, and in both the machinery of the rulers is destroyed by the hearts of the ruled. Both are parables in which a dangerous weapon attacks the order of things: a free human who can see what really is, and question it. Dark City contains a threat more terrible than any of the horrors in Metropolis, because the rulers of the city can control the memories of its citizens; if we are the sum of all that has happened to us, then what are we when nothing has happened to us?

In Dark City (1998), all of the human memories are newly fabricated when the hands of the clock reach twelve.' his is defined as "midnight,"but the term is deceptive, because there is no noon. "First came darkness, then came the Strangers," we are told in the opening narration. In the beginning, there was no light. John Murdoch, the hero, asks Bumstead, the police detective: "When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?" Bumstead is surprised by the question. "You know something?" Murdoch asks him. "I don't think the sun even exists in this place. I've been up for hours and hours, and the night never ends here."

The narration explains that the Strangers came from another galaxy and collected a group of humans to study them. Their civilization is dying. They seek to find the secret of the human heart, or soul, or whatever it is that falls outside their compass. They create a vast artificial city, which can be fabricated, or "tuned," whenever they want to run another experiment.