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April 01, 2007

Troll 2

Nilbog or Bust

By Andrew

Contemporary Cinema, Troll 2, and the Task of the Intellectual

What does one call an individual who speaks three languages? Trilingual. An individual who speaks two languages? Bilingual. And one language? Call that individual your average film-goer, who has less patience for films in alternative grammars than ever before in history. Doubt it? Gather your friends - and not the cinephiles. Pop some corn, pop in some Bresson: almost immediately, the ants start crawling in the pants. Then come the yawns: subtitles, it would seem, are only lullabies for the layperson. Soon your party will be pooped.

And when difference isn't dull, it's droll - funny ha ha. Truly, nothing bespeaks the totalitarian grip of contemporary film grammar than the phenomenon of the "best worst" films. Diagnosed seven years ago by Chris Fujiwara of Hermenaut in regards to Mystery Science Theater 3000, this masscult phenomenon responds with fascistic laughter at any film that dares challenge cinematic realism. As Max Horkheimer noted, "In the twentieth century the object of laughter is not the conforming multitude but rather the eccentric who still ventures to think autonomously."¹ Waves of guffaws bury cinema's timeless ulterior meanings like fossils, leaving intrepid intellectuals like Horkheimer, Fujiwara and myself to do the dirty work, i.e. thinking.

Yet with such a collection of films unjustly derided - Manos: The Hands of Fate and the banality of terror, From Justin to Kelly and the poles of postmodern gender, to name only two - where to begin? Best to start at square one - as Godard was once wont to say, at zero - with the film even its very actors consecrate with "bestworstmovie.com:" Troll 2, a film whose recent revival as "the next Rocky Horror Picture Show"² announces a dangerous new cinematic crossroads.

Indeed, Troll 2 is certain evidence that the "best worst" movie moniker covers up the liberation nascent within such films' deviation from the cinematic norm, withholding autonomous art from view. As Horkheimer's intellectual in arms, Theodor Adorno, rightly contested: "While in autonomous art anything lagging behind the already established technical standard does not rate, vis-a-vis the culture industry - whose standard excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles - works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality."³

Derided for the strangely distancing effects it accomplishes by its broadly Brechtian acting, as well as a script poorly translated from the Italian, Troll 2 deserves analysis for the very reason it is heckled by the hoi polloi: a consciously unconventional film grammar. The "best worst" paradox holds deep within it, kernel-like, a contradiction waiting to explode. Only intellectual work can locate that kernel and - not unlike the movie-goer's favorite concession, "pop-corn" - heat it, empower it, and hold onto the hope that it might lodge itself in the unthinking philistine's throat. Yes, be wary if you prefer a snooze to Deleuze. Imagine a yellow sign if you need one: WARNING: Intellectuals At Work Ahead.⁴

Troll 2: The Film

Troll 2's first image is of a man in colonial garb, tracing a line of flight through the forest, while the first sound we hear is that of a grandfather's voice as he narrates a storybook to his grandson. The grandpa tells us this young man is named Peter, and that he's tailed by unseen demons, shadowed by fog, "the little people of the night." Tumbling, Peter is knocked unconscious, and then awakens upon a fair damsel whose freckles signify the innocent days of Gretel. But this is hardly innocence; rather, it is evil in make-up, evil disguised: what one might call not-Gretel, the witch who feasts on flesh. After Peter is fed a strangely phosphorescent liqueur, said to be "delicious," the unseen demons emerge: goblins at not-Gretel's command. "Chlorophyll green" cascades down Peter's brow, the narrator explains, "the color of the goblins, the color of sap." Transformed into half-man, half-plant by this not-Gretel's "strange concoction," Peter becomes the goblin's latest feast.

Thus Troll 2 establishes itself as a film of opposing forces, contradictions, in the dialectical mode: Nature, taken form in goblins, and Man perpetually on the run, only to be consumed by the Earth. But another layer is present: the Peter sequence is intercut with dialogue between the grandson, Joshua, and the grandfather, Seth. Upon the completion of the tale, Grandpa Seth is at pains to impart to a doubting Joshua that "Goblins still exist." Suddenly, their conversation is interrupted by Joshua's mother. In the jump of a cut Grandpa is gone, and the ensuing dialogue explains to us that Grandpa Seth has been dead several months. Upset at her son's ability to see her father, Joshua's mother scolds him. "Grandpa Seth has remained in all our hearts, but you must banish him from your mind. Remember what the doctor said?" "Of course," Joshua replies. "Grandpa Seth is just an invention of my subconscious."

Here we are introduced to the theme of different generations, which connects the Historical struggle of Man and Nature to the confusion of (post)modernity. Joshua is a young man with special, even supernatural incite into the past - he can commune across the years, beyond death, a living tie to History (one can't help but think of the time-traveling P.O.W. in Marker's La Jetee). That this is Joshua's story above all else is clear in the privilege given Joshua's subconscious in the narrative: Grandpa Seth appears to us, the audience, as he appears to Joshua, and it is clear no one else in the film's diegesis can see him. Yet Joshua is commanded by his mother to follow his heart but not his mind - to banish Seth, and thus History along with him.

Through his visions of Seth, Joshua finds himself in conflict with his own family - and as we shall see, in conflict with (post)modernity itself. Like the devoured Peter, Joshua too is on the run, and his struggle clearly draws a Deleuzian line of flight, defined as "the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions."⁵ Children, of whom Joshua is one, are the future, or so it is said, and as such they embody such a Deleuzian multiplicity; but the future emerges from the past, the deadweight of finite dimensions. Joshua, in reconciling the two, past and future, is the new moment, the Hegelian aufheben, and it is only the tired conceits of the (post)modern world that prevent Joshua from realizing this radical potential - much like the tired conceits of the masscult audience tether cinema to the false realism of spectacular capital.

As the plot develops, the world in which Joshua finds himself is carefully drawn in. Joshua is the youngest son of the Waits family; aside from his mother, Diana, there is also his father, Michael, and an older sister, Holly. Holly is an especially important figure in Troll 2: several sequences in the film establish her as a doyen of pop music, sequences which are cut in the style of the music video, (post)modenity's favorite medium. Holly is also romantically involved with Elliot, whom her father derides as "the playboy son of the Coopers."⁶

The quintessential modern American family, the Waits are planning to embark on the quintessential modern American vacation: a few months in the Country, an attempted escape from the stresses of the City. While a sequence set to folksy music depicts the Waits family van traversing the American landscape, Joshua's visions become darker and continue to pit him against the repressive harmony of the Waits family unit. In one such sequence, Joshua, under the spell of his subconscious, imagines himself under the same horrific man-to-plant transformation as had effected Peter in Grandpa Seth's story. Instead of consoling Joshua amidst his obvious terror, his mother demands that he sing inept, public domain songs - a clear allusion on the film's part to the market constraints of culture in the (post)modern age.

When the Waits family finally arrives at their destination, the country village of Nilbog, the thematic thrust of Troll 2 becomes even clearer: the precipice between the Waits family and their ancestors - the reconciliation of which is Joshua's task and destiny - is this very thing called America. Indeed, the very thing story-book Peter had been running from - in his colonial clothing, no less - was a chaotically unreconciled past, a life left behind in Europe. The Waits themselves are on the run, and soon the goblins' are pursuing them as they had pursued Peter. The very name "Waits" summons thoughts of heaviness, weights, as if the family carries a burden; it also brings to mind the idea of putting something off, of waiting. Both meanings are valid, as the Waits - as representative Americans - have put off dealing with the burden of the past they carry with them everywhere. Visual cues accumulate throughout Troll 2 to press this point: the very recreational vehicle inhabited by Elliott Cooper and his boys is visibly labeled the "Heritage 2000," denoting in the juxtaposition of the past (Heritage) and the soon-to-be future (2000) the (post)modern struggle to reestablish, in some meaningful way, a story of origins.⁷

Over the course of the vacation, Joshua discerns with the help of Grandpa Seth that the population of Nilbog is nothing but the kingdom of goblins with the window dressing of Modern Man: History, and the Nature that has been heedlessly banished there, remains hidden, waiting to violently reassert itself upon the unwitting Waits. Each Nilbog resident - from the Sherriff Gene Freak to a firy, muscular preacher - represents this violent recapitulation, but none more than the witch-like Creedence Leonore Gielgud, a clear doubling of the not-Gretel, whom the goblins refer to as their "queen" ("Ow-ur qu-een is callin... g us..."). Gielgud herself calls the goblins her "children," and she is clearly at pains to explain her "Ancient Druid Origins" as the keeper of "the Magic Rock of Stone Henge." It is Creedence who concocts the potions that turn humans into plants - as Grandpa Seth explained, "the goblins' favorite food" - transforming Modern Man into pure, ancient Nature, which Michael Waits interprets foolishly as simply "typical country hospitality."

Having arrived in Nilbog, the colors of the environment establish that the Waits are in an other-wordly place, where Nature is ever-present and modern Man is lost. Everything from the atmosphere of the country house, to the church that serves as Gielgud's laboratory/Goblin HQ, to labyrinth of the Nilbog forest, to the food with which the goblins endlessly entice the Waits, is shaded in an imposing greenness, the same chlorophyll green that emerges from each goblin victim and that which Grandpa Seth had warned us to be "the color of the goblins, the color of sap." It is this very greenness - Nature - and the resistance to it on the part of the Waits family - (post)Modern America - which comes foremost to mind when Father Waits accusingly demands of his daughter, "Are you still smoking dope, Holly?" Green, as the Encyclopedia of Drug Slang reminds us, is "The basic color of marijuana," and the very word "green" can refer to "An excellent quality marijuana."

"Would you like some, Joshua?:" The Negation of the Negation

Father Waits is mistaken: the evil forces of Nature do not array themselves against a transgressive act like that of smoking marijuana. Instead, they slavishly pursue his son, Joshua. A curious fact should trouble any serious viewer of Troll 2: the very eyes of Joshua, this film's protagonist and our only hope at staving the violent wave that is Nature's Return, are as green as the greenest forest lawn, as green as Kermit the Frog, the Swamp Thing, Hulk, or Ernest Borgnine mixed in a blender. Joshua's skateboard too, upon which the child traverses Nilbog's tired streets, is bathed in a striking green, as if Joshua owes as much to the haunting Nature of the goblins as he does to the Waits. No wonder, then, that the film's haunting final line - "Would you like some, Joshua?" - is an invitation for our protagonist to join the goblin fold, to partake in a feast of truly Oedipal, hence ancient, proportions (a dimension of the film that future Troll 2 studies cannot fail to explore).

Joshua, at last, reconciles Troll 2's plot as he does its internal contradictions - to speak of Hegel once again, he represents the dialectical negation of the negation. But this moment never occurs as one would expect, nor do we anticipate it when it arrives in Troll 2 - a final, lasting testimony to this film's willingness to shatter convention, and, in Chris Fujiwara's words, "the power of strange films to disturb, confuse, and give hope." In Fujiwara's trenchant analysis, the "irrelevant yocks" a film like Troll 2 recieves from the masscult audience ultimately channel the "voice of a viewing public paralyzed by fear, desperate for any externalization of a comforting 'distance' to protect them from recognizing their own anxieties writ large in the image unspooling from the past not dead enough to suit them." Like Joshua in Troll 2's painful final scene, our response should not be to laugh - if anything, it should be to scream, if only then to cry, and at last realize that whatever weaknesses Troll 2 has, they are our weaknesses as well.

Fending off goblins, Seth and Joshua create a transhistorical bond. "Grandpa! Are you really in Hell?" cries Joshua. "No!" replies Grandpa Seth. "But I know a trick that a friend of mine who went there taught me!" In the (post)modern world, devoid of a past, devoid of origins with meaning, we've all been to Hell - now is the time to learn the tricks Troll 2 has to teach us: the calling to save Art itself, to assert its autonomy in a world willing to laugh it off. Nilbog or bust.

NOTES
¹: Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York, NY: Continuum, 1974), 118.
²: See http://www.sltrib.com/arts/ci_5457861
³: Theodor Adorno, "Transparencies on Film," The Culture Industry (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 179.
⁴: Americans are always, it seems, constantly demanding road signs, those ubiquitous boring-ass signifiers.
⁵: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_flight
⁶: Elliott Cooper himself is an important figure, caught as he is between the safe homo-normative comfort of his "boys," versus the dangerous heterosexual "nocturnal raptures" that draw him towards Holly. The ever-present Elliott/Holly axis gives the film a daring sexual subtext, but it is a subtext too rich and beyond the purposes of this essay
⁷: The recreational vehicle itself signifies a uniquely American pastime, which has been put under the liberal microscope in the documentary This is Nowhere.

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