I was supposed to get drinks with my friend Liam the other day, and when we were hashing out details he asked me if, along with drinks, I wanted to see a movie. This is the best question to get from Liam.
Here’s the thing about Liam. He’s down for anything. If I’m on some weird shit—and I’m always on some weird shit—Liam’s on something weirder. It’s one of my favorite things about him. I mean, how else would I have found out about my favorite guitar player, Jody Williams? Or Austen Osman Spare? Or Charles Burchfield? Or A High Wind in Jamaica? Or harmonic resonance? Or steamed hamburgers?
Honestly, I should probably just write this whole thing about Liam. If you’re supposed to build your house on rock and not sand, Liam’s a pretty good rock to build a house on. I first met him my second year in grad school at the awkward department party. I told him I liked his shirt—featuring a neon solar system that it turned out glowed in the dark—and he told me he liked mine and asked if we wanted to switch. So we disrobed then and there and traded shirts and became pals forever. It happens like that sometimes. You should check it out his eternally great basketball/whatever he’s currently thinking about column in the Southwest Review, or if you want something really special, his essay on the seltzer wars that somehow becomes a meditation on his mother’s passing. It’s a real gem.
But yes, I told Liam, let’s see a movie. I mentioned Film Forum was doing a thing on Japanese horror, which has been a small miracle in my life. (Every movie on the list is worth seeing, and most of them have been first big screen watches for me. Pulse? Best movie ever about the internet. Kuroneko? Best movie ever about cats. A Page of Madness? I’ve watched it three times now and I still don’t know what happens, and it blows my mind every time. Also, Onibaba forever.) This night, I had a hope he’d pick the one I wanted to see, but I figured I’d give him the option, no suggestions. If it was meant to be, it was meant to be.
“Want to see Blind Woman’s Curse?” he said. I could have hugged him.
Blind Woman’s Curse is one of my favorite movies. There’s just nothing else like it. I first came across it at Film Noir in Greenpoint, loved it so much I bought the DVD, and I’ve watched it about a half a dozen times since. Never with another person. I was stoked.
It’s a movie that seems to do whatever it wants. It’s violent and gory, it’s slapstick, at times genuinely scary, and there’s gags galore. So much of it is, weirdly, filmed from beneath the floor. Meiko Kaji is incredible as always, moving with an astonishing style and grace, but she also wields power as if it were agony. You can hold her back for a whole movie and then let her glide into a room with her sword, dispatching murder with a kind of determined resignation. Blind Woman’s Curse is a movie that feels like a dream, as Liam said, one that is not worried about its tonal inconsistencies, that seems to glory in them, because that’s what dreams are like.
It’s also what life is like. It makes no sense, but symbols reoccur, and you can interpret them or not, it doesn’t change anything. And the ending of this movie, the promised showdown between the dispirited mob boss and her blinded victim against a matte painting of spiraling clouds, wherein only a symbol is wounded. But it counts for everything. The fight ended, an understanding is reached. The matter painted clouds resolve themselves, and the world is set right again.
A ridiculous movie in some ways: a stinking mobster in a loin cloth, a leaping devoted hunchback, a blood-guzzling cat, impossible trap doors. But always beautiful, content to wander in its own strangeness. The entire movie is a haunted house, the homemade delighted terror of it. There’s just not another movie like this, and it was such a pleasure to be in a mostly packed house that was completely on board. Even better to see it with my friend.
I could keep going forever, because I really do love this movie, and it is sui generis, and more gorgeously so fifty years later. But I’ll leave you with Liam, walking back to the subway with me.
“Man,” Liam said, “movies rule.”
