You know, I’d been wondering for some time, while writing these little essays for the Achiever’s Index, why I would bother to include the lower ranks, particularly the rank of “Travesty.”  I mean, if a work of print or cinematic art were that bad, why would I waste my time writing about it?  And then along came Starship Invasions to alter my perceptions, and to compel me to break out my Travesty Stick for a good, sound beating.  I should perhaps preface this essay by saying that I have a very personal connection to the subject matter, here.  No, I don’t believe in aliens: I mean, give me a break – the Fermi Paradox, and I rest my case.  No, it was because… well, let me tell the story thus:

At a particularly rough time in my life, I went to visit a very good friend of mine out in central Pennsylvania.  When I arrived, he proudly presented to me one of his recent acquisitions, a book titled “ASHTAR,” with a bizarrely campy painting on the cover of a white-skinned humanoid alien with a big head, wearing some 1970’s artist’s idea of a space suit – essentially spandex.  This was, as we found out from the nigh-incoherent text within, Commander Ashtar of the Ashtar Command.

He was also Jesus Christ.  That’s right.

We gradually came to realize that we were reading the sacred text of a UFO cult.  It was HI-LAR-I-OUS.  I still remember the absurdity of that book and its insane contents, and how much better I felt after that night: as screwed up as my life was back then, at least I wasn’t in a UFO cult.  And to this day, we occasionally greet each other with the phrase: “Friend, I AM ASHTAR!”

So needless to say when I happened to turn on my television the other day, which receives only a handful of channels and those very badly, and saw this movie playing, the entire experience suddenly crystallized: this was Ashtar: THE MOVIE, in its whole spirit if not literally.  Moreover, to say that the film is as insane as the book would be an act of gross understatement.  The movie is much, much worse.

The film opens with a long bit of overwrought expository dialogue delivered by voice-over, intended to give the impression that all the alien characters are communicating by telepathy.  Christopher Lee (YES, that IS Christopher Lee!) plays bodysuited and dragon-clad alien leader Rameses, who has come to Earth to supplant the Human race with his own, whose planet is about to be consumed by a supernova.  Typical sci-fi fare for the period, I’ll grant you that.  But it begins sliding out of control pretty fast when a great deal of assumptions start happening that begin dragging the plot along at breakneck speed.

See, first he has to sample some humans’ DNA (their Ripperesque Precious Bodily Fluids!) from which he determines that humanity was the unknown ancestor-race of his own Alpha Centaurians.  And so naturally that means they’ll have to be eradicated, now. (Wait, what?)  So he deploys his fleet in orbit to shoot a ray at Earth that will cause humans to commit suicide.  (Woah, back up.)  First, however, he has to make sure the Intergalactic League of Races (Who?) doesn’t interfere.  So he steers his upturned pie plate down to the Atlantic ocean to find their base on Earth. (His what?)  What follows is a bizarrely convoluted set of stylized bluffs and counter-bluffs, culminating in an epic bodysuit-and-finger-laser raid on the League’s submarine combination pyramid base and cathouse.

Man, I only WISH I were making this up.

This movie clocks in at an efficient 89 minutes, and is the ultimate expression of 1970’s-style bad taste and poor aesthetic judgement.  There are positive reams of silver mylar and solid-color pleather, mirrors on any surface capable of being mirrored, clashing color schemes involving crimson, harvest gold and orange, welding-masked robots spouting post-hippie slogans about intergalactic peace, and to crown it all, the whole thing is set to an electro-lounge score that can only be properly encompassed by the word “Jazzalicious.”  Go ahead, click that link.  I dare you.  I DARE you.

And it stars Robert Vaughan and Christopher Lee.  I mean, Robert Vaughan, I could see doing this kind of thing.  After all, he was The Man from U.N.C.L.E., so he was no stranger to bad taste.  But somehow, in the ensuing years, Christopher Lee’s claim to authenticity makes me forget that he actually WAS this person way back when, a B-Movie actor (at best) playing vampires and alien heavies, famed for his fixed stare and wooden performances, and holding his own against campy greats like Vincent Price.  It is entirely logical that he would appear in this trashiest of trashy flicks, and yet still it took me so much by surprise that I could not help but stare, slack-jawed, at the insane fruits of his labor, up there in all its badly-colored glory for all to see.

This in the end is what makes watching this awful film such a sublime experience to be had.  These are people doing their best to make the most of what is clearly just a job, a film of no value whatsoever, greenlighted by God only knows who and made on a budget of… I can’t begin to guess.  And consider also, that this film is a contemporary of Star Wars, which so clearly designated the final cinematic break between this kind of crappy filmmaking and the new way of science fiction.  Star Wars was so far ahead of its time that it created an entirely new way of making films; Starship Invasions is so horribly past it without knowing it that it exudes dreadful, embarrassing obsolescence from every frame.

But when you think about it, movies like this get made all the time.  Try to think of all the movie trailers you’ve seen on TV in the past year and I bet you won’t even remember a tenth of them.  They come, they go, and people pay their rent and move on.  When they call it “The Industry,” they are hardly lying.  Making movies, by and large, means cranking out a disposable product.  And in this, Starship Invasions represents the diametric opposite of a film like Star Wars, and is therefore a foil to its success.  In its campy, nonsensical, poorly-constructed scenery, you see everything that a movie should not be, an open book for the filmmaker by means of negative example.  And you also see Christopher Lee in black spandex and Robert Vaughn wearing a lot of turtleneck sweaters.  And what does that amount to?  Not a whole lot, but it sure is funny to look at.

It’s interesting to conclude with the final realization that what goes around comes around.  In a perfect example of the “sunrise, sunset” phenomenon, the worst films of the Star Wars franchise, the three ill-advised “prequels,” feature B-Movie actors from this era very prominently.  And who is chief among them?  Christopher Lee.

Rameses lives.

STRIKE: As horrendously bad and overplayed as this movie is, I couldn’t help but smile (and not with mirth) when I saw Christopher Lee, who is so obviously playing a horrible role for everything it’s worth.  Yes, he, like Robert Vaughan, was, and to an extent, is a B-movie actor, but he’s the consummate example of the career actor.  He’s doing this movie because it’s the job he was hired to do.  God bless you, Chris.

GUTTER: Bodysuited aliens, underwater pyramids, upturned pie plates conquering the Earth, that jazzalicious soundtrack… am I forgetting anything?  Oh, yes,  Robert Vaughan.  I… I mean, really?  Somebody greenlighted this one, and you really have to wonder who.  This movie is just so bad that the best one can do is  laugh, and perhaps wonder why they were even making movies in Canada in the 1970’s to begin with.

OVER THE LINE: Where can one begin when the movie never was on the near side of the line?  Before seeing this movie I didn’t even know that they were making movies in Canada, let alone in the 1970’s.  And no offense to my many friends north of the border, but this movie is probably a good example of why that is the case.

Overall Rank: TRAVESTY

This movie is a disgrace, so much so in fact that it more completely defines the word than I had imagined possible.  Yet in that, there is an element of the sublime.  It takes a strong constitution and a decidedly warped sense of humor to subject yourself to this kind of thing, I admit, but there’s something to be said for movies this bad.  They’re still consummate travesties, in every sense of the word, but I can’t help but feel drawn to them in a weird way, and to Starship Invasions in particular, in which you see actors trying so hard to make the best of an intolerable situation.  If you can stand to see something this awful, watch Starship Invasions and you will simply not believe it.  It is so much the sine qua non of bad taste that there is simply no other comparison.  All peace to you, Galactic Brother.

Starship Invasions was only ever released on videocassette, to my knowledge, and so finding it now will be a serious challenge.  You can find clips on YouTube that will pretty well give you the gist of it, though – and in any event, I think that sitting down to watch the whole movie might possibly be fatal to a movie-watcher without the proper training and mental discipline.

Starship Invasions was filmed at Hal Roach Studios in Toronto, Canada, and distributed by Warner Brothers Entertainment in 1977.

Okay, so I figured it was time for another essay on arts and such, and so I decided to expand the horizons of The Achiever’s Index into the world of animation.  And for starters, we have the unbelievably surreal and mind-warping animated event FLCL, rendered in English as “Foolie-Coolie.”

Actually a combination of the Japanese kanji letters フリクリ, which I am informed make a nonsense sound something akin to “Fooree-Cooree,” FLCL gets its name from some translator’s estimation of what the sounds would be if the Japanese could form the palatal letters so crucial to the Latinate languages.  And yet therein, at the very start, lies the first of a series of bizarre cultural disconnects that are at the heart of FLCL’s strangeness, and my own ambiguous feelings about this challenging and, ultimately, incomprehensible cartoon.

I watched this last Sunday while doing some preparatory work for the return of 6-Commando, and almost at once I realized that something was very screwy about the entire setup.  To try to condense the entirety of the six-episode OVA miniseries into a description would probably not be possible, but the plot shares much in common with the Theater of the Absurd, as well as with many American and British “nonsense” humor writers such as Terry Pratchett and Daniel Pinkwater.  Yet where Pratchett and Pinkwater go to great lengths to explore the bizarre aspects of what are otherwise internally-consistent worlds they create, FLCL continuously warps itself, making the whole story spin wildly out of control almost from the very start.

The basic and very tenuous central thread to the plot is the coming of age of Naota Nandaba, a pre-teenaged Japanese boy in a suburban town, whose encounters with his father, his grandfather, his brother and with several girls in his life have left him feeling trapped and jaded about his future, as his emotional development begins to outpace his his physical age.  This is a pretty typical setup for a story – in American literature, you can just start with Tom Sawyer and work your way forward.  And so it’s somewhat predictable that when a nineteen year old, rebellious young woman named Haruko Haruhara rolls into town, the result will be a pseudo-romantic awakening for the frustrated youth.

But beyond this core mise-en-scène, very little of the series holds together.  The first encounter between Naota and Haruko is symbolic in the extreme – she hits him with her Vespa, revives him with CPR, then strikes him in the head with her electric guitar.  Doesn’t get more heavy-handed than that, you have to admit.  But then, robots begin coming out of Naota’s head.  I mean, literally – the first one, a series regular named Canti, literally climbs through Naota’s forehead.  Then he does battle with another robot that comes through the back of Naota’s head, eventually merging with Naota by eating him so that… well, I mean, it just goes on like this.

Woven into all of this is a strange but inescapable subtext about the United States that I can’t quite put together.  Haruko is clearly representative of American youth: mobile, independent, apparently sexually promiscuous. The prevalence of electric guitars as a symbol of… well, SOMETHING, is unavoidably American as well, as is the presence of baseball as a life-metaphor for Naota (as well as part of his backstory – his estranged brother is in the United States playing minor league ball with an unnamed team).  There is even, in a later episode, a sudden and inexplicable reference to the television show South Park.  But as to what it all amounts to, I haven’t a clue.  By the end of the series, I was left with the distinct feeling that I was not so much watching the program as I was allowing it to happen in my presence, and the effect was rather unsettling.

I have been pondering this for some days now, and I have come to the conclusion that FLCL is either a cinematic Zen Koan, or a colossal exercise in self-reference – or self-indulgence.  It’s all symbol and no substance, a series of disjointed cultural references which might make sense to the Japanese, but to me seem to be chosen almost at random.  It’s surreal in the extreme, but beyond the point at which one can comprehend any kind of underlying artistic process at work.  Yet its animation is too masterful, its mix of styles too diverse, and its massive set of references too intricate, for it to be simply a load of nonsense.  It can’t be nonsense.  But it makes no sense.  And that’s the crux of it: can the point be that there is no point?

As a devotee of Western Philosophy I take it as a first principle that things have to have meaning.  To an extent even the meaningless must have meaning: the nonsense art of the Dada and the Surrealists was itself purposeful in that it evoked a reaction against the conventions of the time in which they developed.  But FLCL is reacting against nothing.  It has no point of reference, internal or external, to link it to anything but itself, and its self-centric and often alinear plot, if one can call it that, has very little underlying it but willful weirdness.

Yet some works like this do exist and are sheer brilliance, in spite of their incomprehensibility.  Take, for example, Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension.  It is a true Zen Koan, or in the Western sense, a Splendid Source, in that in itself it makes no sense except by what you can intuit about its sources, and those myriad things upon which it has had an influence.  It means nothing and is itself unknowable, yet all things spring from it and all things point to it.

But FLCL seems to be the reverse of this.  It points to all things but ties nothing together.  It is simply, from a storytelling standpoint, “a bunch of stuff that happens.”  There are clear metaphors at work and attempts to add moralistic or philosophical turns to the events of the, er, “story,” yet they fall dreadfully silent compared to the overweening insanity of the story the characters, and the setup, generally.  It is more like a Quentin Tarantino move, obsessed with its own coolness and its own ideas, to the exclusion of common sense and good judgement.  Yet it remains seductive and fascinating, to the extent that I watched the whole three-hour run back to back.  Its very weirdness is its attraction to me, in that I keep trying to divine its meaning, despite the fact that it probably has none.

But is it art?  In the loosest sense I suppose it is.  But its broader cultural significance continues to elude me.  It is its own singularity, like the Quentin Tarantino films, and like Tarantino it is constantly in danger of disappearing up its own ass.  But unlike Tarantino, it never does, and remains its own bizarre little storm of animated incomprehensibility.  But is it the nexus of the universe or just a load of silliness?  In the end, it may actually be both.  I could hardly call it an Achiever, I’m afraid, since it exists entirely too much in its own universe, but it is still worth seeing, if only for the fact that it is, in my opinion, that rarest of all gems: a genuinely new thing on the face of the Earth.

STRIKE: The animation changes very rapidly, and the “realistic” (read: traditional Anime) style merges with a cartoony and very loose representative iconographic set very smoothly, and this is a huge part of the cartoon’s appeal.  The basic thread of the story, also, is a pretty good one, in spite of the enormous effort that seems to have been made to cover it up.

GUTTER: Do things always have to mean things?  Yes, they do.  In the end, however much I may have the urge to apologize for this series because of its cool art and its risky complexities of style, there’s just too little backing it up to make it hold together for me.  The story is a simple and typical one, and its emotional level is very straightforward, and this makes the rest of the insane swirl of activity seem all the more of an imposture.  It tries too hard, and obscures its own purpose in the process.  It’s fascinating and engaging, but it’s still half-baked, leaving a lot of confusion and half-developed ideas at the bottom of the pan.

OVER THE LINE: It’s impossible to tell where the line actually lies with this series, and that isn’t really a good thing.  In rejecting all boundaries it has left itself with only the barest thread of a framing device, and it’s clear that the writer was grasping at something very mundane, and trying to dress it in something experimental and bizarre.  The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with a classic story told in a new way.  Yoji Enokido, the writer, has written a lot of other series which were more successful in that department, but in his urge to go in a new direction he abandoned the strong center of literary structure, and the result, however intriguing it may be, was a haphazard mess.

Overall Rank: BUMMER

As seductive and interesting as it may be, the simplified quasi-Postmodernism of “Weird for the sake of Weird” isn’t enough for me.  This just doesn’t come close enough to making any kind of logical or coherent sense for me to call it a genuine Achiever.  Originally, I classed it as “Un-Dude,” but that isn’t quite right either – I still think it’s worth seeing.  It isn’t incompetent or in any way “bad,” it’s just, I think, trying to do more than it can, and not doing any of it properly.  I’ll probably end up seeing it again, several times, before I’m done with it.  But the strong likelihood that it’s all just a lot of self-indulgence on the part of the writers, to say nothing of the fourth-wall breaking self-referential “What Does It All Mean?!” ponderings that pad out the final episode, kill its long-term potential as a really enduring series.  What may endure is its experimentality and its willingness to warp itself for the purpose of that experimentation, but the half-assed attempts to weave in a moralistic subplot kill its credibility as an art experiment, and I think FLCL is destined to be a footnote to the world of animation in the long run.  Its importance will be in what comes after it, I think, and that is where its real long-term interest will lie: in watching it for means of comparison, rather than for itself.

You can view FLCL in its entirety at http://www.hulu.com/flcl,but with Hulu’s trend towards subscription don’t expect it to stay free there for long.  I think the best way to view this is just to buy the DVD set, which, in spite of my panning, is probably worth having, for any collector of animated film.  The full runtime of all six episodes is approximately three hours.  Though suggestive, it is not explicit.  Still, I advise discretion when viewing this series.

FLCL was originally released in Japan on DVD and video by Studio Gainax in 2003.