Simultaneous Tensions: The Duo-Vision of Wicked, Wicked

Art & Trash, episode 20
Simultaneous Tensions: The Duo-Vision of Wicked, Wicked
Stephen Broomer, November 10, 2022

The split screen and its close relative, the multiple screen image, have existed since the wild and restless early years of commercial cinema. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer examines the ways in which multiple screens subvert storytelling through the exhaustion of narrative information, through a central case study: Richard L. Bare's Wicked, Wicked, a bizarre attempt on the part of Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to exploit the inherent dynamism of this polyrhythmic form.

SCRIPT:

The split screen and its close relative, the multiple screen image, have existed since the wild and restless early years of commercial cinema. A split screen is a decidedly mod effect, a single continuous plane that’s been divided to contain multiple compositions through optical effects, and not always along the boxy conventions of traditional movie composition; a multiple screen image, on the other hand, features images cast alongside one another, a technique that saw use in art cinema around the same time that Marshall McLuhan began writing about the electric tribalism of mid-century media. Either approach can be suggest simultaneity or provide thematic or rhythmic contrast. Among the earliest examples of split screen images are Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman and Lois Weber’s Suspense, films in which the split screen is as much about enhancing meaning within the film as it is about perceptual enticement. These experiments slowed as the conventions of cinema became fixed. Commercial cinema tends to be backwards-facing and conservative when it comes to form; early filmmakers, especially in the first days of Hollywood, hesitated to trust their audiences to interpret the structures and boundaries of an image. Griffith’s motivated camerawork and invention of the close-up were met with resistance from those who would condescend that moviegoers were too stupid and easily confused. The first major attempt at playing with the shape and density of screen action wouldn’t come until near the end of the silent period, with Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon and its three-screen multiple-projection battle sequence, an aesthetic Gance called PolyVision for its ability to trap the viewer in polyrhythmic attention, volleying between actions, or between action and rest, the triptych offering a metaphor for the immersive violence of modern warfare.

Mainstream cinema had long settled into the comfortable boundaries of the box frame, gradually elongating it into a rectangle for the sake of epics and spectacles, images so ‘grand’ they needed a new container. Even then, the rectangles of cinemascope aren’t conceived for innovation, but to bring cinema closer to that most respectable and entrenched genre, the landscape painting. As the aspect ratio of film became increasingly wide through the 1950s, and postmodern shifts in thinking about vision and meaning took hold, old possibilities for depicting simultaneous action reemerged. For some, a widening screen didn’t represent an opportunity to make wider compositions, but a possibility for allowing more content to play out across the screen, in simultaneous, side-by-side images. The wider frame could be split in a resonance of Abel Gance’s PolyVision.

For commercial filmmakers, the subdivision of the frame was an opportunity to represent simultaneous action as spectacle, and this is how it appears in films like Grand Prix, The Thomas Crown Affair, and The Boston Strangler, a discordant gesture to shock and delight the audience, thoroughly mod, a gimmick of pure style. Elsewhere, multiple screens reflected McLuhan’s vision of the world as a new media habitat, a vision that, like Gance’s, embraced the polyrhythmic coexistence of images as a mirror to the crowding of modern life and perception, a fact as commonplace as the layouts of magazines. It was a new kind of dreaming, one reliant on a long tradition of abstract thought, of making meaning through witnessing tensions between disparate parts. Such screen environments emerge almost simultaneously in commercial cinema, in art cinema - for example, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Chelsea Girls - and in fairground cinema, such as the New York World’s Fair’s To Be Alive, and Expo 67’s A Place to Stand and Labyrinth. One of the few filmmakers to translate his approach from one cinema to another is Brian De Palma, whose Dionysus in 69 was made for two screens, a translation of immersive, experimental theatre into cinema. De Palma went on to use split screens to show simultaneous action in his many thrillers from Sisters onward.

By the early 1970s, the frequency of split-screen sequences in commercial films had begun to decline; MGM, however, had banked on this gimmick to carry an entire film, Wicked, Wicked, a thriller made by Richard L. Bare. Bare was a seasoned television director who had been responsible for the majority of the episodes of Green Acres. The filmmakers and studio saw this gimmick, which they called ‘duo vision’, as something that could transform the way that audiences engage with movies. An opening title card announces Wicked, Wicked as “an experience that will challenge your imagination,” suggesting that the filmmakers and the studio understand this technique as something that is essentially participatory. Wicked, Wicked was not only a film of two screens but of two minds: on the one hand, it was an ensemble melodrama in the style of Grand Hotel, and on the other, a gritty, perverse proto-slasher more in the style of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Curtis Harrington than typical studio fare. It melds the tidy, patient style of television with the bombastic violence of genre filmmaking. These incompatible styles make Wicked, Wicked unpredictable and uncomfortable. 

A staff member at a resort murders guests while wearing a grotesque monster mask. Afterwards, he steals away with their bodies. The house detective investigates the resulting disappearances. The film simultaneously follows the struggles of other characters in the hotel, including a suspicious, brooding young handyman; the detective’s ex-wife, a nightclub singer; and a long-term guest who’s being pressured out by management. Wicked, Wicked is a whodunit, but the ‘total vision’ of its multi-screen form subverts the focus that a mystery demands, often providing digressions that reveal all to the audience. In duo vision, there’s nowhere to conceal information. With nowhere for its details to hide, the film quickly reveals the identity of the killer. It then becomes something else: an anti-thriller of sorts, a film in which many strange and slight events play out - digressions, flashbacks, and fantasies - often subtle enough to escape attention; such events create an atmosphere of confusion and subliminal messaging. Without the distraction of an unravelling mystery, the immersive, polyphonic quality of ‘duo-vision’ transforms Wicked, Wicked into a survey of all the ways a narrative can be served, transformed or enhanced by two images.

‘Duo vision’ is used in both simple and complex ways. It is used to split perspective such that a character is seen on one screen and what they’re looking at is seen on the opposite screen. It introduces and complicates environments through contrasting angles. It subverts the traditional shot-reverse shot structure which, in the single-screen thriller, might be used to suggest an impending threat. In doing so, Wicked, Wicked places the viewer even closer to the perspective of the voyeur; they become the absolute voyeur. And whichever character is doing the looking is their avatar and is in control. Humdrum on-screen action is contrasted with menacing, thematically loaded action, a sign of the filmmakers’s attempts to pace the film so as to not overwhelm the audience, but also, an act of making danger and violence ordinary, even familiar. Uniform colours resonate between the two screens; this in itself is an act of conforming the image that is opposite to common uses of the split screen, which has historically been used to emphasize dynamic contrasts. It is an example of the relative formal conservatism of the filmmakers, and their debts to the uniform visual culture of television. This art direction often marks the film less as a dynamic split screen and more a trap of the resort’s textiles, the wallpaper and carpeting becoming a patterned prison. The dual screen recedes occasionally, giving way to wide establishing shots, in an inversion of the traditional use of the split screen in commercial cinema. There, the split-screen would be reserved for impact and emphasis, while here, with Bare embracing the multi-screen image as his dominant mode, these wide, uniform, unbroken compositions signal transitions or the passage of time.

Inevitably, Wicked, Wicked confuses screen direction; as it can contain multiple eyelines in a single composition, and this becomes doubled across its two screens, the conventional montage in each image becomes confusing, and the film abandons a clear mapping of space, instead embracing the many things that a second image can provide to a narrative. Discontinuity is built into the dual screen. The presence of a second screen can be digressional - flashbacks play on it, it illustrates events that are referred to in conversation; it can be utilitarian - for example, when it shows both sides of a telephone conversation; it can be dynamic, as it embraces parallel and simultaneous actions; it can be evidentiary, as when one character declares the grand size of the hotel and the grounds are shown as proof; it can be fantastical, as when the killer fantasizes about a woman he’s speaking to; it can expose ironies, as when the killer talks about his interest in chemistry, or when a matronly guest brags about her past, living the highlife; and it can serve continuity, or exposition. The dynamic forms that come into play often engage with continuity explicitly: screen action is manipulated to control how space is revealed. For example, in a late scene, the killer enters the wrong room, and emerges to find himself directly opposite his intended victim, leading to a struggle. The space, and the collision of their eyelines, is revealed by the split screen, and leads to a struggle and chase, but the way it’s introduced gives some credit to the audience in reassembling its visual puzzle. Elsewhere, the sometimes-strained dynamism can also suggest an accidental comedy, most readily apparent in scenes that illustrate the theme of voyeurism. Once the disappearances are confirmed to be murders, everyone is watching each other, creating a web of dense sightlines across the two screens. This theme of voyeurism never goes so far as to suggest that the eyes of the movie are something like the then-nascent field of video surveillance, but there is a sense that the viewer, aware of the killer’s identity and watching him evade detection, is more a witness and accomplice than a sleuth. When flashbacks come, duo-vision assigns them unambiguously to the killer, an advantage of duo-vision that also suspends any chance of surprise. There’s no room for mistaken identities.

Richard L. Bare was well-suited to multi-camera television, making his embrace of duo-vision a natural one. Still, one can identify where the filmmaker had reservations about the audience’s ability to keep up. This is most apparent in scenes that prolong action; at the same time, weird, mod editing suggests a degree of expectation that the audience is sharp enough to follow the film even when images come in unusual forms. Another major distinction from the conventions of television lies in the film’s sound design: sound is divided like the actions playing out on screen, sometimes overlapping, sometimes so faint as to be indecipherable, sometimes penetrating and commanding such as to overwhelm the already-dense imagery. Dense sound design was becoming commonplace in New Hollywood Cinema; here a similar density is simply a side-effect of the film’s gimmickry, marking an odd, chance collision between the new perceptions of art cinema and Richard L. Bare’s square, network television storytelling. In addition to the dynamic, overlapping dialogue and sound effects, Wicked, Wicked uses musical digressions to establish the atmosphere of the resort, where songs of love are slightly out of tune. In addition to the nightclub singer’s strangely amateur performances, there is a wild-eyed organist, whose accompaniment provokes memories of the image of the silent-era movie house, as she performs the 1925 score to Phantom of the Opera, a work of ostentatious drama. Later, the killer remembers his abusive childhood to the sounds of a melodramatic song-and-dance number.

Despite all of its dynamic promise, the dual-screen film has a tendency to deflate and flatten out tension; it can make any film Brechtian, inevitably reminding the viewer that they are watching a movie. As the multi-screen composition exhausts narrative information, it acts contrary to the needs of a mystery: to cloak, to conceal. When Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol used the same device a few years earlier in Chelsea Girls, they did so conscious of its ability to overwhelm the viewer into a full body tumult, or conversely, to deaden perception, to allow the viewer to lapse into boredom. This contradiction is at the heart of the Warholian pop aesthetics, a state of consumption: the object becomes both dynamic and indifferent. If you’re looking at one image, why not look at another? When Brian De Palma uses the split screen in his films, it is decidedly a means of exhausting narrative action, twinned to his prolonged action sequences that make even the most dramatic, violent gesture inevitably and decidedly anti-climactic. De Palma exercises the comedian’s wisdom: he tells the audience what he’s going to do, then he does it, then he tells them it has been done. These are uses of the dual screen that show mastery because they accept that the gift of visual polyphony brings with it demystification and exhaustion. For some this would be a sacrifice. For these filmmakers, it is a second gift.

But for Wicked, Wicked, it is a noble and bizarre sacrifice. Was Richard L. Bare aware of the narrative exhaustion that the dual screen posed? His ease in revealing all, and at the same time, his clever use of the dual screen to digress and contextualize events, suggest that Bare knew that working with a gimmicky framework of innovation meant finding new methods for storytelling. In the final act, the killer throws himself out of a window, and his descent is mirrored, falling in symmetry. It is telling that this symmetrical composition is the climax, for all other pairings have been exhausted in the film’s tireless catalogue. And what is symmetry here, in the context of narrative? It is aesthetic flourish, a suggestion of the killer’s split personalities—that is, his bloodlust and his illusion of normalcy—finally being reconciled in a bone-shattering, organ-squelching thud. In this sense it is metaphoric and dynamic. But like all of those other means by which narrative has been exhausted, it is also an ultimate form of redundancy. It is not utilitarian like other images in the film: it is not surveillance, it is not a soap-opera memory or the counterpoint of simultaneous events. It is one event, mirrored, a slow ‘bellhop’ out the window, and far from utility it is a romantic expression of something imprecise, at its worst, a limp declaration of cinema as a mirror, or at its best, an embrace of the dynamic potential of the multi-screen image, to subvert realism, to deny immersion, to produce instead a purely cinematic vision.

CREATOR’S STATEMENT

Made in 1973, after, one could argue, the heyday of split-screen sequences in Hollywood films, MGM’s Wicked, Wicked employs this gimmick as a close relative of the 3-D movie. Posters for it even advertised, “no glasses—all you need are your eyes,” a tacit acknowledgement that it belonged to the same spectacular family as, say, The Mad Magician, or of its contemporaries, The Stewardesses and Flesh for Frankenstein. In other words, gimmickry was already skewed towards exploitation cinema, and gimmick marketing stayed with exploitation cinema as it turned from fantastical genre films of the 1950s to violent, taboo and erotic films of the 1960s and 70s.

In this video essay, I have made an effort to tour the evolution of the multiple-screen image. It is, of course, partial, and I have prioritized those films that have an undeniable relation to Wicked, Wicked — strange though it may seem to argue that the film arises from the same impulse as Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, or for that matter, Abel Gance’s Napoleon or John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, Bare’s film is very much a response to the new media habitats and the New Hollywood Cinema. It just happens to be pursuing that dynamism from the staid vantage of the sitcom or with the melodrama of Grand Hotel. The parallel that is most worth lingering on is that of Brian De Palma, whose stubborn elongation of time has always been his strong suit, and whose use of the split-screen, contemporary to and continuing long after Bare’s film became a footnote in the Great Book of Hollywood Busts, is so aggressive in its self-conscious narrative exhaustion that it finds a new dynamism that has nothing to do with anticipation.

Bare’s film is still struggling in the wilds of formal utility, and there’s a sense that the ‘duo-vision’ of the film is really just a cross for the film to bear, a heavy burden that forces the filmmakers to take a quick-and-nasty genre film and fill up its 180 minutes of vision, usually with information and digressions, but sometimes with the parts we cut away. This means that Bare’s film is forced to become—surely against its best interests—an encyclopedia of all the ways in which narrative can be served (and undermined) by a dual screen. It also means that Bare’s film interacts with one of the great maxims of cinema, the remark often attribute to Alfred Hitchcock that drama is “life with the dull bits cut out.” If a slasher movie is forced, by a will to density, to become an epic, many of those boring parts are likely to be included. This is the danger of combining dynamic form with utilitarian filmmaking; but of course, the result is something miraculous. It’s hard to call Wicked, Wicked ‘misguided’ because it offers the moviegoer a unique experience, an unprecedented amalgam of New York pop maximalist style and sitcom storytelling.