The Eyes of March: An Alternate Hyperreal Calendar

Did the Spring forward bring you to the brink of March Madness? While this month was a relatively restrained time for your favorite local film club, there’s no need to start whispering “Et tu” at us. Put your knives away and know that we’ll be coming back bigger than ever in April (no fooling). In the meantime, you can sate your movie-watching lust with these fine wine pairings of the films we showed in March. From revisionist westerns to a pair of gender-bending camp horror films starring statuesque women with powerful bangs, this is the Alternate Hyperreal Calendar for March.

Thomasine & Bushrod—McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Yeah. It’s right there. It’s in their names. If you crave another revisionist western after watching Thomasine & Bushrod that’s titled after its main stars. Look no further than Robert Altman’s hazy snow western McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Led by Warren Beatty as McCabe and Julie Christie as Mrs. Miller, the film follows a lonely gambler who struts into a hazy mining town. He gambles his way up to creating a brothel in the town with the help of his business partner, Mrs. Miller.

Aside from the name similarities, both films share a nice slow pace. In the case of Thomasine & Bushrod, each second you spend with the main characters, the more you fall in love with them. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the relationship the main characters share boosts them to create a booming sex empire in the dreariest of mountain towns. Both films are revisionist westerns, which, contrary to most traditional westerns, blurred the lines between right and wrong. The stories often centered on those who lived in that grey area of morality and showcased an arguably more complex view of race and gender than some of the original westerns. These films are best enjoyed as a Sunday matinee double feature with nice herbal and liquid refreshments.

Dazed and Confused—Nowhere

Hear me out, man. Dazed and Confused has always been a pure joyride, straight summer bliss with impeccable sound, stock full of sprawling carefree youth. To me, there is no coming-of-age equal in its haze of teenage summer dopamine. I’d happily recommend the likes of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) or simply its spiritual sequel Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), but an IMDB page can, and has, already done that. Any attempt to supply a film of adjacent tone would only usher disappointment, leaving the viewer longing more for a rewatch of Dazed than anything else. And who could blame them?

In turn I have no choice but to recommend its complete opposite side of the coin, dark to balance light. My double bill is its bleak, saturated, queer west coast sibling, Gregg Araki’s Nowhere (1997). Casually anarchistic, spun out and directionless as Dazed and Confused, Nowhere earns its place. Araki’s final entry in his “teenage apocalypse” trilogy has likewise no ambition of traditional narrative, only seeking to soak in impure neon pleasure while it has it. A joint passed between the two; living only in the adolescent present, promise of future forgotten. Like Dazed, it has snowballed into serious cult status since its initial limited release. Araki’s film shares the portrait of youth filled with sex/drugs/friends/parties, but instead steeps it in weaponized camp, inundated neon, and total teenage nihilism. With a humanoid lizard. Take it or leave it. It’s confident, oversaturated pop art with a hardline to earnest youth outlook and turmoil as acute as any Linklater film. If Dazed is everyone’s somewhere, eternal residence in warm early summer nostalgia for both its generation and new, then Nowhere is its captivating opposite.

Frankenhooker—Dr. Caligari

Few works match the singular, sleazy camp of Frank Henenlotter’s oeuvre, but coneussiers of gender-bending mad science and dominant women with bangs will find comfort in the arms of Dr. Caligari, the best practitioner of New-Wave theater-kid psychosexualism this side of Forbidden Zone. She, quite literally, isn't your grandfather’s Caligari: here the descendant of our most iconic Expressionist creep plays evil sex therapist with syringes of hormones and glandular extracts, turning boys into girls and girls into boys and doing it all in a yellow DEVO minidress with huge metal tit cups. Why? Don’t worry about it. After all, logic and reason fall flat beneath the daffy, hypnotic joy of witnessing pro over-enunciators seduce and soliloquize and generally devour scenery which calls to mind an after-dark wet-nightmare Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It’s some deeply delicious, occasionally funny, squirmingly horny, and genuinely unsettling strangeness from the director of several equally weird pornos – those with a depleted tolerance for midnight-movie experimentalism are advised to stay away, but those who can dig a repressed protagonist getting her kicks from grinding into a sore-riddled flesh mattress? Well, the asylum is always open.