THE SECRET MEANING OF MOVIES, MOSTLY OLD AND IN BLACK AND WHITE, AS WATCHED ON SNOWY, LATE-NIGHT TELEVISION IN CHEAP MOTEL ROOMS OF LONGING, DESIRE, AND FLIGHT, LIGHT FLICKERING ACROSS SPARKLING CEILINGS LIKE NIGHT SKIES THICK WITH GALAXIES, OR THE REFLECTION OF CAMPFIRES IN ANCIENT INDIAN DREAMING CAVES.
A
TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934) is considered by most Tarzan fans to be the best of the Johnny Weissmuller-Maureen O’Sullivan Tarzan films. Surely it was the sexiest, with Weissmuller and especially O’ Sullivan nearly naked during the film’s 105 minute running time. Picking up where 1932’s Tarzan The Apeman left off, avaricious ivory hunters arrive in the African jungle in search of the fabled Elephant’s Graveyard. Tarzan is shot and left for dead, but rescued by his simian friends, Tarzan races towards the elephants’ burial ground and its precious ivory, where the evil poachers have already been eaten by lions, and Jane is next on their menu. But a convenient elephant stampede, heralded by that classic Tarzan yell: ahh-ee-yachhh-ee-yahhh, saves Jane from the lions’ fangs in the nick of time.
Themes: treasure hunts, daring rescues.
Tone: rousing, sweeping, tense.
Keywords: civilization, elephant graveyard, hunting, ivory, jungle, lion, poacher.
1
Back In High School When Jane Played Tuba
(Poem With Beautiful Quarterback And Blowjob)
**
In the marching band & Jane was brilliant
In Latin & editor of the yearbook
Jane was famous for giving exquisitely sensitive
Albeit dramatic head
But during Jane’s extravagant going down
While Jane was merely disguised
As some beautiful quarterback’s
Lap of bouncy hair,
Jane would star in
Passionate movie-dreams of love
Rescue & escape
From Jane’s sad, boring, brown-eyed
Failed, mousey, blowjob life
With happy endings
In Jane’s passionate movie-dreams
Jane is no longer a fatty & drab
& Jane’s face is no longer
A pimple plantation
No, Folks, Jane’s flawless complexion
Is peaches & cream
Jane’s tropical-sun kissed skin is golden as yellow roses and ripe
Jane’s mane of hair blonde & luxuriant
& Jane’s blue, eager eyes
Seem almost too large, too luminous
For Jane’s fresh pretty petal of a face
This beautiful, blonde girl, Jane
(Probably a Lost Princess)
Discovers herself time after time
In great peril, & Jane is such
A delicate, helpless, albeit voluptuous
Little thing
Once the creepy Clay-People discover a sullen Jane
Hiding out in the Sunken Forest
& since Tarzan is not on hand
To save Jane, Jane is easy
To capture. As Jane struggles & struggles
To twist free
From the crumbly fingers
Of the creepy Clay-People
The long sleek muscles
Of Jane’s smooth arms & legs
Flex like the shadows of leaves and flowers
On flowing water
Much as the long hair of Jane’s mother
Tangled in the twisted roots
Of Jane’s father’s tree
2
Tarzan Dives From The Dangerous High Cliffs
(Poem With Blonde Helpless Girl, Cave Creature, And Black Tragic Water)
**
As Jane struggles & struggles
To twist free from the crumbly clutch of the creepy Clay-People,
Jane’s Jungle-Princess gown of spotted skins
Negligible to begin with
Is torn in revealing places, & now
A large section of Jane’s smooth, downy tummy,
Jane’s supple left shoulder
& the soft upper swelling
Of Jane’s perfect left melon of a blonde breast
Are bare.
Deep in their hidden caves
The creepy Clay-People chain Jane
To a spongy pillar
Where the damp soil
Begins to hungrily engulf Jane
Like the movement of some madly sporing mold
Over moist, sweet white bread, or a waterfall of wildly flowing foam full of blind fish, the ravenous
Mud will spread over Jane’s lovely flesh
Flesh like yellow roses luminous in moonlight
Until Jane too will become a zombie of goo
Deaf & dumb, a mud babe
Ugly as a turd
But this will never happen to Jane
Beautiful, sun-kissed, blonde girls are always rescued
In the nick of time
Tarzan is hurrying to Jane now, now!
Tarzan’s hard muscled body arches
As Tarzan dives from the high cliffs
Into the dangerous water far below
Dangerous deep, dark water
A black lake with no bottom
(The local natives sing
In their creation songs)
Tarzan swims underwater, suspended
Seemingly in the fluid
Silvery center of Jane’s movie dream
Dreaming itself to life
Floating between worlds
Waiting to be born
Tarzan rises like a bubble from the bottom
Of Jane’s brain
Hooked and reeled by the light of Jane’s movie-dream of love
In his night-sea journey
To his real life’s beginning in the waters
Of Jane’s movie imagination
Tarzan swims into what is missing
With no shadow yet to trail behind him
Like a flickering fin
Tarzan does not see the starlight drifting on the surface
Of the dark water above him
Beneath Tarzan there are other water beings
And fish blind in the black water of night
Nobody has ever seen before
Beings and blind fish that
Like submerged stars blink
Deeper than thought or language
Like a wondrous water plant’s blooming
Tarzan’s hair sways & sweeps
About Tarzan’s head
A halo of submerged light
Or the nearly luminescent wings of fish
Tarzan’s bulging eyes are black with awareness
& expectation
Tarzan surfaces inside a cave
Whose moist shadowy ridged walls rise
High out of sight into unfathomable womb-like darkness
Tarzan braces his arms upon a ledge that feels like wet flesh
Tarzan takes a well-deserved breather
It happens in a heartbeat
The ropey muscles of Tarzan’s shoulders shudder
Tarzan is pulled backwards into the tragic water
As waves of night rise about him
His skin seeing down deep beneath him, as it does in dark water
Tarzan chops desperately at the entangling tentacles
That pull Tarzan deeper & deeper
Into dark, tragic water murky as
Afterbirth
3
Pussy-Simple Apeman,
(Poem With Steaming Rainforests, A Land Time Forgot, Perfume, Ugly One-eyed Angel)
**
The huge glowing eyes of the old creature are
Unblinking eyes, yellow, luminous
Wild with mourning
Tears flowing from them like falling stars
& yet there is no hatred
In those terrible eyes
& when Tarzan plunges at last
Knife in teeth toward them
There is no evident fear
& no evident pain
As Tarzan’s knife slashes those tragic eyes open
Like the soft translucent flesh of testicles
& as milky foam spews
From those ragged wounds
Those torn, ancient eyes give no sign
Of terror or anger or anguish
Or even regret
Only a sort of sorrow maybe
That there is no surprise ending
That as real as ritual
Tarzan will clutch Jane’s slender body
Tight in his bare, muscled arms
Tarzan’s wild breath hot on Jane’s face
As vine to vine they swing
Through slippery green air
Of steaming rainforests
Ahh-ee-yahhhh-ee-yahhhh
To where Tarzan’s enchanted escarpment rises into the clouds
(Star Penis, the pygmies call it in their prayers)
Where in a land time forgot
Jane will swim naked in endless moonlight
With that pussy-simple apeman
Jane’s own inner eternal Tarzan
So, folks, the last laugh is on
That old dumb hopeless myopic motherfucker
For rearing its old hoary, bald head
Once again when it shouldn’t have
Again & again & again it does it
In backseats after ballgames
In the dizzy perfume of balconies
That old ugly one-eyed angel never learning
Its proper place
Ahh-eeyahhhh-ee-yahhhh
So there you have it, folks
The end of Jane’s passionate movie-dream of love
Not to mention famous, flamboyant blowjob
& once again that old hapless goofy Black Lagoony creature
Will be the one to suffer
For the simple fact that time
& the passionate story of True Love
Are always on the side of
The blonde & beautiful
The exquisite & escaped
Jungle Jane
Ahh-ee-yahhhh-ee-yahhhh
Tarzan and His Mate was the last of MGM’s Tarzan series to be targeted for a strictly adult audience. The remaining MGM Tarzans, made under stricter censorship guidelines, were geared for the whole family.
At age nine, Weissmuller had contracted polio. At the suggestion of his doctor, he took up swimming to help battle the disease. In the 1924 Olympics, he won five gold medals and one bronze. He won fifty-two US National Championships and set sixty-seven world records. Weissmuller starred in six Tarzan movies for MGM with actress Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane and Cheeta as his pal Chimp. The last three also included Johnny Sheffield as “Boy.” He became the definitive Tarzan and the first to be associated with the ululating, yodeling Tarzan yell, which was created by splicing together recordings of three vocalists to get the effect — a soprano, an alto, and a hog caller.
While playing in a celebrity golf tournament in Cuba in 1958, Weissmuller’s golf cart was suddenly captured by rebel soldiers. Weissmuller got out of the cart and gave his trademark Tarzan yell. The socked rebels began to jump up and down cheering “Tarzan, welcome to Cuba!” and then provided Tarzan and his companions an escort to the golf course.
For his contributions to the motion picture industry, Tarzan has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6541 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.
In 1979, after suffering a series of strokes, Tarzan entered The Motion Picture & Television Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, where he regularly frightened the other elderly residents by wandering through the halls while calling out for his jungle friends: ahh-ee-yachhhh-ee-yahhhh, and at the graveside service in Acapulco, as his coffin was lowered into the ground a tape recording of his yell ahh-ee-yachhhh-ee-yahhhh was played full volume three times
Ahh-ee-yahhhh-ee-yahhhh
Ahh-ee-yahhhh-ee-yahhhh
Ahh-ee-yahhhh-ee-yahhhh
B
HIGH SIERRA (1941) is an early heist film noir written by W. R. Burnett and John Houston and directed by Raoul Walsh. The movie features Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart, full of hard-boiled vitality, as “Mad-Dog Roy Earle, a complex human being, a former farm boy turned mobster, a gunman who can befriend a mongrel dog (Pard), and goes out of his way to help a crippled girl, and who finally only wants freedom for himself. The film is notable as the breakthough in Bogart’s screen career, leading to a succession of iconic roles that earned him critical acclaim. Upon its release, High Sierra was touted as the consummate gangster film, providing a heady mix of everything a gangster film should: speed, excitement, suspense, and that ennobling suggestion of futility, which makes for irony and pity, with the perfect epilogue in which the gangster dies rather than surrenders.
1
Another Star Kissed Goodbye, Poem With Gunmoll, Get-Away Car, Camel Or Lucky Strike, And Close-up
**
The gangster blasts his way out
Of the can into the illusion of a new life
On the lam from the law & the Lord
The gangster gone wild running through the badlands
Cactus and sand of Death Valley
The gangster goes gushy at a cheap motor court
Over a crippled blonde girl with big blues
After a hard bitten
Lifetime of despair and desperation
The gangster & his gunmoll played
By a lovely, luscious young Ida Lupino
Were too hot & heavy traveling together
That motel clerk had already spotted them
Thanks to their front-page fame & even little Pard,
Their outlaw puppy, had his mug in the paper
Bogie belted the clerk, locked him in a closet
Bogie would drive on into L.A. for his cut alone
Ida would escape by bus
They would meet up later, disguise themselves
Somehow, settle in a small town
Somewhere in the middle of America
Raise a family, live on the lam forever
If it came to that
For some quick cash instead
Bogie sticks up a store in broad daylight
Bogie makes the inevitable gangster getaway pell-mell
Over dusty backcountry roads
There is a dizzy spinout & crash
There is a mad scramble
Up a rocky mountainside
Only to be cornered by swarming lawdogs
In the High Sierra cliffs like
A rat in a hole
Or still-born in a birth canal
Gunfire from the cop’s gats
Exploding like popcorn in a heavy iron skillet and poured
Into an old brown grocery bag
Greasy and secret
To sneak into the drive-in movie
So this is the way
This gangster flick ends, Bogie
Firing up a final Camel (or probably Lucky Strike)
(Medium shot) reflects
Sizing up his dire gangster getaway situation
His gangster grin tight
Ironic in a closeup
Though not really in despair
So do not pity the poor gangster
For Bogie is weary of it all
Being on the lam is no life
A price on your head
The constant fear
Of being fingered
The constant fear of being shot down
Like a mad dog in the street
Or walking unaware out of a Chicago movie house
With a foreign woman wearing a red dress
Nowhere finally to turn
For solace, for grace
For the love of God
The end of the alley, curtains
For the gangster-man
Sacrificial and sad in his sentimentality
Sacramental in his ritual role
Of redemption
Bitter within the hard approximation
Of justice confused
With the fate of stars
Like gods who eat themselves
Alive, Red Giants devouring
Themselves as they fulfill their fates
To burn brightly and devolve
Into White Dwarfs who dance off the stage
At the end of that vaudeville called
The universe
Just another star kissed goodbye
Imploding before our eyes into
A black hole from which
No light can ever escape
The gangster only longs at last
For his human heart to stop beating sowildly
The gangster prays to snap his fingers and vanish into the bright light of dawn
And for his burning star to come to rest at last
A star only half seen anyway, or seen for merely a moment
Out of the corner of the audience’s eye
A remote viewing at most
A star only of the mind, an apparition
Of flame and flickering fame
The gangster has always felt most
Alive anyway in the imagination
Of his audience
The gangster longs to touch her hair just one more time
The gangster longs to feel this way about his gunmoll forever
Over and over again
A being of light and projection
The gangster feels the unbearable mass of absence most
A gangster with no eyewitness
Is only black space, a vacuum of nothingness
An abyss from which no cry for pity can rise
There are just two kinds of death for a spectral gangster
Sooner or later
With an empty sealed box to bury
During a starless night
There is no celestial navigation
For a gangster ghost
2
Ancient Gangster Dream, Poem With Screen Door, Primitive Chanting Preacher, Circling Black Shadows, And A Dying Mother’s Screams
**
And all last night, while the lawdogs waited armed
In the forests below, Bogie
Freezing in the zero High Sierra darkness
Had curled childlike
About his last dreams
Fearful dreams but his own dreams
Dreaming himself born
His dying mother’s screams
The July sun burning into the tar-paper roof
The bumping of flies against the screen door
A primitive, chanting preacher
The huge, black shadows that had circled relentlessly
For three days about the coal camp
Finally Bogie had dreamed for a last time
His ancient gangster dreams
Of jobs & shootouts & getaways &
Of gangster deaths
Bullet ridden, leaking
The last closeup
The last words
Bubbling from Bogie’s dying lips like a cartoon balloon
Of blood, Mother of God,
Is this the last
Of Mad Dog Roy Earl?
Bubbling from Bogie’s dying movie star
Lips, a blood bubble of ancient
Gangster prayer
Father, why hast thou bugged out on
Your only begotten gangster, your own
Mad Dog Roy Earl?
3
Ancient Gangster Grin Of Regret, Poem With High Gleaming Granite Cliffs, Bullet With Number On It, Cheap irony, and Lawdogs Armed to The Teeth
How
Did I ever get my moviestar butt
In this grade-B, black & white bullshit
To begin with, Bogie reflects, flicking
Another fag out into the cold
High Sierra morning air
They wanted Raft to begin with
Agents, Bogie reflects, producers
Assholes
In a slow pan
Down the steep, rocky mountain side
Bogie watches the early morning light
Begin to glisten on the granite cliffs
To shine bluish from the firs far below
Where the armed law waits with a bullet
With Bogie’s number on it
I hope I don’t piss
Or shit myself when I eat
That hot lead, Bogie reflects
I hope mine
Ain’t a kicking, snapping, foamy
Gangster death
The gangster only longs now
To be down from this mountain of doom
Bogie reflects upon the ironic poetry of following
His own fresh footprints
And traces of feathertips down through the snow
Of the mountainside
The gangster picking his way, armed and dangerous, among clouds
Transparent as angels with wings of transcendent forms
Wings of snowflakes and frozen fearful breath
The gangster falling like a cruciform shadow
Over the snow and rocky grimace
Of the mountain’s skull
Now if I was a fancy-dan like little Freddy Astaire
I could just fox-trot my ass out of this low-rent gangster flick
Hell, I could have been a hoofer
I could have been a song & dance man
Here at the end of the movie Bogie admits
Everything, spills the beans, rats
Himself out. Cops a plea. Bogie
Owns up at last to his final movie star
Gangster great sin, that
Attitude whose name is Cheap
Irony. Bogie acknowledges that
Ancient movie star gangster
Regret for all his lost
Chances as a cheap movie star gangster
For true American movie
Martyrdom
As a heroic shot soldier. Or sailorboy drowning
In dreamtime and baptismal belief
A philosophical, world-weary Bogie
In the final
Frames of this last gangster flick
Reflects that at least the lawdogs could never
Nail him for that capital
Crime whose name is
Anonymity
4
ENDLESS FRAMES
**
Bogie hears the barking
Faintly at first, then suddenly near
As little Pard, that cute gangster puppy,
Races on cue crazily
Up the steep, rocky slope toward
That outlaw whose name
Is Death
Bogie flicks his last fag into the cold
Mountain air. Bogie knows
This is the big kiss-off
Bogie steps out now to the edge of the cliff
To look for little Pard, exposing himself
To the deadly waiting aim
Of that lawdog sniper
Who has made his way above Bogie’s
Hideout hoping to get just
Such a clean shot as this
To end the movie on schedule
Sometimes I go around pitying myself
Like a punk, Bogie reflects
As Bogie waits patiently at the edge of that cliff
For all of gangster death
Where in the eternity of those final
Movie-moments Bogie’s Mad
Dog Roy Earl movie corpse
Will forever fall
Freely in those endless frames
chuckkinder 