Dementia: Myth and Nocturne
Detours, episode 11
Dementia: Myth and Nocturne
Stephen Broomer, November 1, 2024
John Parker’s Dementia is an unconventional, low-budget, independent film, made without synchronous sound by amateurs, a cruel adventure of symbols colliding in a web of nocturnal fantasy, classical allegory, chiaroscuro, and a menacing atmosphere. It exists at the midpoint between the film noir and the psychodrama, and the motives of its makers are caught somewhere between aspirations to join the film industry and the restless desire to expel from themselves some kind of evil that had crept up on them in their dreams. It is a haunted film, one that, through oppressive symbolism and illogical bridges, forms a portrait of damnation, here on skid row where devils are almost as terrifying as angels.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses Parker's film in relation to collaboration, the trance film, and the representation of dream-life in cinema through the ages.
SCRIPT:
Even among the first filmmakers, there were those who wished to dramatize the style and subconscious structures of a dream. Early fantasies commonly featured illusions that subverted intelligible reality into a chimerical realm of mermaids, giant frogs and grinning moons. They promised a cinema where shadows would move of their own volition. The experience of moviegoing offered a ready metaphor for dreaming: scenes play out over which we exercise little control, but in which we might participate, awakening as they do our longings, our pains, and what has been repressed. Filmmakers often took to representing the dream state with the voyeuristic distance of an invisible bedside spectator—where the proscenium chains all scenes to a stage. This was a disavowal of cinema’s potential, to occupy the dream itself, but this approach was also well-suited to the formal conservatism of a nascent medium. With the films of the Surrealists, form began to bend to the sensuality and fury of dreams, most vividly in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, in which the absurdity of the subconscious is revealed in an iconoclastic form: tumultuous contexts, suggestions of pliable age and gender, and bizarre, often horrifying, metaphorically potent imagery.
By the early 1940s, American cinema was breaking new ground following on the example of the Surrealists. A new form of independent avant-garde filmmaking emerged in the psychodramas of Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, and Gregory Markopoulous, among others—films that P. Adams Sitney called ‘trance films’ because the protagonist was almost invariably a sleepwalker, acting out rituals and confrontations, in the rhythms of dream-time and through the exaggerated expressions of silent drama. These are films that realize the dream as a prison-house of desire. The psychodramas embrace myth and metaphor and are often assembled to mirror the traps of nightmares; they are unapologetically dreamt, populated with symbolic figures who encounter death and shame and fleeting pleasures, reckoning with the pains of legacy, belonging, and frustrated creative action. The psychodrama filmmakers follow the Surrealists in their collaborative makeup, a cinema of collective dreaming among filmmaking partners like Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, Anais Nin and Ian Hugo. The psychodrama is also markedly personal, courageous but trembling. In The Maltese Falcon, when Sam Spade declares the shattered bird as “the stuff dreams are made of,” he means that it’s a thing of imaginary value: by the terms of reality it’s worthless, nothing but a fantasy that’s spent. Like that bird, the American psychodrama is a cinema of spent fantasies, tragic and fatalistic, a soulful, suffering mirror on the inner lives of artists in the twentieth century.
Like the psychodrama, film noir is oneiric. Noir is often dreamlike in its arch romanticism and its stylization. It builds upon the continuity tradition of Hollywood cinemas passed, but more than its predecessors ever did, it presents the world in nocturne, where the nighthawks at Phillies come alive as symbols, where Redemption (Veronica Lake) meets the Hanging Man (Alan Ladd) in the dead end dive of the Last Judgement (Richard Conte). In the film noir, fate and destiny, irony and tragedy, are as much a part of the landscape as they are a facet of story and theme; and just as the dreamer, whether inclined or reluctant, is the conductor of their interior world, the characters of noir often occupy a romantic atmosphere that reflects their desires, their rot, their despair.
John Parker’s Dementia is an unconventional, low-budget, independent film, made without synchronous sound by amateurs, a cruel adventure of symbols colliding in a web of nocturnal fantasy, classical allegory, chiaroscuro, and a menacing atmosphere. It exists at the midpoint between the film noir and the psychodrama, and the motives of its makers are caught somewhere between aspirations to join the film industry and the restless desire to expel from themselves some kind of evil that had crept up on them in their dreams. It is a haunted film, one that, through oppressive symbolism and illogical bridges, forms a portrait of damnation, here on skid row where devils are almost as terrifying as angels.
A woman wakes from a nightmare. Her apartment is first seen from the building’s exterior, in a composite that announces the drama’s artificial construction. The composite hums with flat neon signage and painted stars, glimpsing the spare homeyness of a rented room. The mise-en-scene is stylized, romantic to the fever and fear of this woman, experiencing just another night in a series of dark nights of the soul on skid row in Venice, California. Venturing out into the dark and empty streets, she encounters symbolic figures: a dwarf newspaper seller, a pimp who doubles as a nightclub impresario, a policeman who doubles as the memory of her father, a rich man, a flower girl, an army of faceless figures, each one a witness and an absence. Like them she is symbolic, credited as a gamin, an urchin, what Victor Hugo once called a “cherub of the gutter.” A series of episodes play out, all overshadowed by a newspaper headline that declares a killer is on the loose. The Gamin is transported to a phantasmal graveyard where she bears witness to scenes from the married life of an unhappy couple, culminating in murder. Is this her childhood? Are these her parents? She goes club-hopping with a wealthy glutton and murders him. When the film began, did she truly wake, or is this a dream? Is she destined to be a victim, or is she the killer? Her smile suggests that she may be the killer, or at least, that she delights in the mystery and chaos of the Venice night. Like the trance films before it, Dementia presents objects as symbolic. If the Gamin is an urchin, she is also a petty thief, and the objects she comes into contact with become symbols of something lost that she is seeking to recover, but that will remain out of reach. She covets a broach that is grasped in a severed hand, and broach and hand and the violence wrought to it, by her, are inextricable from one another.
Actress Adrienne Barrett was director John Parker’s secretary. The story they would later tell is that one day, Barrett presented Parker with a dream that she had; the details of what she told him are unknown, but we might presume that in her dream, she murdered a rich man and fled from the police, finding herself cornered in a nightclub. Those are some of the salient points of what the dream would become. Or it could be that in this dream, she found herself rambling through the darkening Southern California night in the company of devils and ghosts, finding herself in a graveyard where scenes from a marriage erupt in brutal violence—further stations of what her dream would become once Parker had dramatized it. But then, perchance her dream was about a city full of faceless people, standing like statues buttressing the path from a skid row rooming house to the graveyard of memory. The path itself carries the dreamer, whether running down alleyways chased by searchlights, or ferried from location to location in a town car.
The story of Barrett coming to Parker to share her dream is an apocryphal one, as are most claims around the production of Dementia. The nature of Barrett and Parker’s collaboration resonates with the work of Hammid and Deren, whose psychodramas took Deren as their protagonist, Hammid as a technician and occasional performer. By the circulated account of the film’s origins, Adrienne Barrett, like Deren, was the dreamer, and John Parker became the illustrator of her dream. They made it first as a ten-minute short, for which actor Bruno VeSota was brought in to play the wealthy victim. VeSota, a professional actor who also made exploitation films, would later claim that when Parker chose to expand the film to a feature length, they shared directing duties, and that VeSota improvised much of the story. Many details of the production are unverifiable and of questionable accuracy, like a dream half-remembered, subject to revision. The film itself plays without credits, suggesting a porous, collaborative approach to traditional creative roles that contradicts VeSota’s claim of authorship.
For whatever battles may have been waged privately over control of Dementia, the primary creative force of the film is Barrett herself. She performs her nightmare, a nightmare in which she is given only a symbolic name; otherwise it could be said that she is playing herself. The dark night of the soul for this cherub-of-the-gutter starts and ends in the solitude of her skid row apartment, and in between, we experience a waking nightmare, where she lead the audience from passage to passage, episode to episode, dream to dream. Dementia is a feminist film, for it shows us a strong woman and throws her into peril without a male rescuer; it casts us back into her memories to reveal traumas that speak to the unhappy union of father and mother, a broken system of servitude; it forgives her motivations for committing mad, evil, selfish acts, by offering up a world where lunatics run the asylum, where justice is evanescent, where the law is a decaying, masculine order. It is a literal patriarchal order, as she’s pursued by the image of her dead father, reimagined as a crumpled detective who captures her in searchlights and handcuffs. The men who occupy the world of Dementia are grotesques: from the pantyhose-masked ghouls-in-gray-flannel-suits that crowd the crime scene, to the grinning and slobbering predators that shape the gamin’s night, these men are natural inhabitants of the desolate alleys and streets of Venice. Likewise, the other women who appear are archetypal wraiths: the abused wife in the downstairs apartment, the dark-eyed flower girl, the showgirl mother, all are phantoms. Like many noir films, Dementia critiques a patriarchal society even as it condemns the single woman, for the gamin is offered up in her solitary path, with her wild, searching eyes, as a sinner, in ready ascent from traumatized victim to scheming, greedy, selfish murderer. She occupies a violent world where men control everything. Her violence, whether motivated by trauma, greed, or rage, is an unshackling from the social bonds of an unfair contract. The shackles of society are made literal in the end, when the accusing fingers of an entire nightclub full of people point to her, the cop holding up his cuffs, as the room erupts in cruel laughter. The crowd is joined in their laughter by the reanimated corpse of her victim, howling uproariously from a barred window looking down on her.
Dementia is oneiric not only for its narrative trajectory—the frame of it as occurring within the closed circuit of a nightmare, one that begins and ends with the same damnation—it is also dreamlike in its staging, its cinematography, its mise-en-scène. From its romantic stylization of the loneliest hours of a city, to the roles played by doubles throughout, to the strange transitions that draw Barrett from station to station, Dementia evokes the atmosphere and transit of a dream. Its resistance to realism is limited, however, by the fact of the movie camera. Like the protagonists of trance films before her, the gamin is a sleepwalker, the film is her nightmare, and therefore, the composition assumes subjective properties, yet those properties are inherently committed to the realist project. Maya Deren wrote of the authority of the photographic image, that it always casts an authentic image second only to reality itself: there is a perversity to the photographic properties of Dementia, for its oneiric dimension both subverts and maintains reality. Credit it to the lofty goal of drawing a nightmare out from the symbolic recesses of the subconscious and into the realist epistemology of the motion picture.
Critical commentary on Dementia has focused on the film’s allegorical qualities and the gender role of the Gamin. John Parris Springer writes of the Gamin that she is masculinized by her short hair and her clothes. In other words, she is in defiance to the rigid dress code of film noir, in which the femininity of even most violent femme fatale is often reinforced through their appearance, through the glamour of the evening dress typified in Rita Hayworth’s Gilda. This charge of androgyny suggests the critic’s bias towards Hollywood style, when in fact the film may be subconsciously challenging noir’s emblematic symbolism simply by presenting Barrett as-she-is. Her pursuit of a broach—she cuts off her victim’s hand to retrieve it—might be taken as a demonstration of an Electra complex, that by stealing his hand, she’s claiming the phallus as her own, claiming male power. This was how the critic Herman Weinberg interpreted the film when he called it “the first American Freudian film.” But the Gamin is subsequently transformed into a glamorous feminine figure, in the final act, when she becomes a singer in a nightclub of the damned, a strapless Galatea pawed at by a devilish pimp. She is not masculinized like Electra. To interpret Dementia as a retelling of the myth of Electra holds true if one accepts it as a film made in the shadow of Hollywood noir; but it is also a film made cheaply, perhaps even in found clothes, about the lost souls of skid row, where an urchin can be a devil or an angel and be without blame, for this cherub-of-the-gutter occupies a world far from privilege, far from glamour, where beauty can only be natural, smeared, or missing. The Gamin’s androgyny echoes another cinema altogether, as a fainter rendition of the subversions of Un Chien Andalou, in which pliable gender haunts the narrative and deepens its discontinuous spell. Freud’s conception of the Electra complex, manifesting as penis envy, is a withering excuse for the Gamin’s rage and violence. The Gamin seems in no way motivated by sex, if anything, she appears repulsed by the gyrations of dancers and by the overtures of the rich man and pimp. Her temptation comes only by the thrill of theft and death, and her role is not as an avenging angel guided by the Furies, but as a creature of pure rage. In myth, Electra is driven to vengeance against her mother for the death of her father. The Gamin’s origins are opposite of this. In the fog-enshrouded graveyard of her past, we see her murder her father for killing her mother. In a literal expression of betrayal, she stabs him in the back. The cemetery sequence is an expression of Parker’s efficient visual storytelling: the drama plays out in a fantasy of displaced action, memories transplanted into the open set of the graveyard, cardboard tombstones and billowing fog drifting through the props that imagine a sitting room.
The Gamin seems to escape her pursuer—the policeman who resembles her father—by entering a nightclub. There she discovers the form of servitude that Venice’s pimp-devil has in mind for her, to her visible relief: she will be singing with the Shorty Rogers and his Giants, a modern jazz ensemble whose performance complements composer George Antheil’s anxiety jazz and eerie vocalise. Tossing a frock her way, the club owner effortlessly turns her into a conventionally glamorous, sensuous woman, ready to play her own part, less ready for her own inevitably ironic end. The club atmosphere is one of harsh directional light and toe-tapping, casual dancing, and lip-licking, peering faces. The Gamin grins for this is a homecoming: this is her world, just as the hell of skid row was her world. Out of the searchlights of her revenant-father, here, at least, she can be free. In this silent drama, silent but for the vocalizations of yelps and laughter, the Gamin finally prepares to sing: instead, finds herself sold and trapped, drowned in those tides of mocking laughter and pointing fingers. No words escape. Through their laughter she is borne back to where the night started, for all this to start again.
When Dementia was finished in 1953, it circulated to limited interest. In 1955, Parker screened it in New York City. When it was banned by the state board of censors, Jack H. Harris became interested in the film. Harris, head of Exploitation Pictures, purchased the rights to the film. Harris would make a career out of purchasing films with sensational, marketable aspects, for example, films that had stirred controversy and provoked censors. He would alter them to amplify their perceived commercial potential. He would later do this to student films like John Hofsess’s The Columbus of Sex, a Canadian experimental film that Harris acquired while it was on trial for obscenity; Dennis Muren’s Equinox, a monster movie about young people encountering the devil while on vacation; and John Carpenter’s Dark Star, a dark comedy of the space opera era, made in the wake of 2001. Harris would go about his usual hatcheting with Dementia: he gave it a more salacious title, calling it Daughter of Horror, and added narration read by Philadelphia radio personality Ed McMahon, later famous as the co-host of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Harris’s transformation of Dementia into Daughter of Horror is a template of exploitation marketing: the film’s new taglines could have been used just as readily for surrealist films and trance films — “Blood on her hands…Doom in her eyes…See…the ghoulish monster!…her mad fury!….a sinister hand that lives! See it from the beginning.” Harris knew all too well what is meant by the phrase ‘the stuff dreams are made of’: that movies, like dreams, were pliable, subject to reinterpretation, bendable and moldable in waking memory. Barrett’s nightmare is resilient against Harris’s strange embellishments, but the story of Dementia and its re-editing runs in parallel to the story of the film itself, for it is a tale of repression and sanitization. What made the psychodramas of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington and others so incendiary was how personal they were, in their trembling convictions and their vivid renderings of trauma. With his taglines, Harris invites the audience to sit in judgment of the Gamin, but the film as Barrett and Parker had imagined it does not. Like the psychodramas, Dementia was conceived from the perspective of a haunted dreamer, not a ghoulish monster, full of mad fury with doom in her eyes. And like many ironic visions of damnation, hers is a hell of repetition. In the Freudian model, character is defined by past and trauma: and the Gamin is a perfect Freudian object, for she will continue to re-experience these traumas, to embody this past, to live out this same dark night.
