Movies have heroes and vil­lains. Or at least chil­dren’s movies do; the more sophis­ti­cat­ed the audi­ence, the hazier the line between good and evil becomes, until it final­ly seems to van­ish alto­geth­er. Not that cin­e­ma direct­ed toward gen­uine­ly mature audi­ences dis­pens­es with those con­cepts entire­ly: rather, it makes art out of the ambi­gu­i­ty and inter­pen­e­tra­tion between them. This is true, to an extent, even in some of the recent wave of big-bud­get super­hero movies, in the main exer­cis­es in rolling an “adult” tex­ture onto sto­ries essen­tial­ly geared toward ado­les­cents. Hence the appear­ance of the Jok­er, Bat­man’s grin­ning arch-neme­sis, in “The Aes­thet­ic of Evil,” the Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy video essay above.

In the Jok­er of Christo­pher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, “we see an evil that’s relent­less, pri­mar­i­ly because the core func­tion is com­plete and total anar­chy. What­ev­er order is estab­lished, who­ev­er it’s under ‚must be destroyed. As a result, an epoch is cre­at­ed where any rules or codes of con­duct are bro­ken. Any­thing that you antic­i­pate will hap­pen, will result in the oppo­site.”

This Jok­er made an out­sized cul­tur­al impact with not just the explic­it­ness of his dis­or­der-ori­ent­ed moral­i­ty, but also a mate­r­i­al-tran­scend­ing per­for­mance by Heath Ledger. In that same era, Jamie Hec­tor took a com­par­a­tive­ly min­i­mal­ist but equal­ly mem­o­rable turn in David Simon’s series The Wire as Mar­lo Stan­field, a drug king­pin “too vil­lain­ous for the vil­lains.” Like the Jok­er, Mar­lo is a law unto him­self, “will­ing to destroy the equi­lib­ri­um of any facet of the world there is, on a whim.”

These two rep­re­sent just one of the forms evil has tak­en in recent decades. The essay’s oth­er exam­ples range from Psy­cho’s Nor­man Bates and 2001’s HAL 9000 to The King of Com­e­dy’s Rupert Pup­kin and Fan­ny and Alexan­der’s step­fa­ther Edvard — or rather, the unwel­come trans­for­ma­tion of the fam­i­ly Edvard rep­re­sents. The most dia­bol­i­cal evil does not con­fine itself with­in the per­son of the antag­o­nist, espe­cial­ly not in the work of Michael Haneke, which twice appears in “The Aes­thet­ic of Evil.” Ben­ny’s Video is on one lev­el about a mur­der­ous ado­les­cent; on anoth­er, it’s about the “eva­sion of the real” that seduces us all. The White Rib­bon is on one lev­el about ran­dom acts of vio­lence in a small vil­lage; on anoth­er, it’s about how evil reflects “the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of a soci­ety.” Haneke’s films have often been described as dif­fi­cult to watch, and that may well have less to do with what they show than what they know: even if we aren’t all vil­lains, we’re cer­tain­ly not heroes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles on the Art of Act­ing: ‘There is a Vil­lain in Each of Us’

Rare Video: Georges Bataille Talks About Lit­er­a­ture & Evil in His Only TV Inter­view (1958)

“The only thing nec­es­sary for the tri­umph of evil is for good men to do noth­ing,” a Quote False­ly Attrib­uted to Edmund Burke

Why Do Tech Bil­lion­aires Make for Good TV Vil­lains? Pret­ty Much Pop #93 Con­sid­ers “Made for Love,” et al.

The Aes­thet­ic of Ani­me: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tra­di­tion of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Blue had a big moment in 1990’s Euro­pean art­house cin­e­ma, in films like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue and Derek Jarman’s auto-ele­giac Blue, the last film the direc­tor made before his death in 1995; blue as a col­or of impos­si­ble love, loss, and death — moods and themes deeply inter­twined with music in both films and both direc­tors’ oeu­vres. But where would the col­or blue in art house cin­e­ma be with­out David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Vel­vet, the sur­re­al neo-noir that intro­duced Lynch to Brook­lyn-born com­pos­er Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, and thus began one of most cre­ative of art house rela­tion­ships between cin­e­ma and music?

Badala­men­ti first joined the film’s pro­duc­tion not as a com­pos­er but as a voice coach for star Isabel­la Rosselli­ni, who played a risky role not only because of Blue Vel­vet’s sado­masochism and nudi­ty, but also because she was cast as a lounge singer, even though, as Rosselli­ni admits, she could­n’t sing. “My friend Peter Run­flo said Lynch was shoot­ing in North Car­oli­na and Isabel­la Rosselli­ni wasn’t hap­py with the peo­ple teach­ing her to sing,” Badala­men­ti tells Spir­it and Flesh mag­a­zine.

“I said, ‘You can get any­body for that. I got­ta wash my car.’ [laughs] I was more into arrang­ing and orches­trat­ing and didn’t know who David Lynch was. But he con­vinced me by say­ing it’s a Dino De Lau­ren­ti­is movie – I knew that name. I met with Isabel­la and after a cou­ple of hours with a piano and a lit­tle cas­sette recorder, we got a decent vocal.”

Lynch want­ed Badala­men­ti to stick around and write a theme that sound­ed like the Cocteau Twins’ “Song of the Siren,” his favorite song at the time, which he could­n’t afford to license. The result was “Mys­ter­ies of Love,” sung by anoth­er stal­wart Lynch musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tor, Julee Cruise. But it was the vocal stylings of Dorothy Val­lens that gave the film its title and its pre­vail­ing mood. “Adorned in blue eye­shad­ow, carmine lip­stick and a cheap wig, Dorothy sings in a joint called ‘The Slow Club,’ ” writes The New York Times’ Lau­rie Win­er, “Per­form­ing only bal­lads with the word ‘blue’ in the title, she man­ages to put togeth­er a tat­tered glam­our, like a rem­nant from a 40’s movie, that is pal­pa­bly dis­tress­ing when her stare floats out into the smoke-filled club.”

Lit in lurid blue light, Rosselli­ni sings the film’s “Blue Velvet/Blue Star” med­ley in a smoky con­tral­to, recall­ing Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky’s obser­va­tion, “the col­or blue can even cause a tem­po­rary paral­y­sis.” In the video at the top, a YouTube user has recon­struct­ed Rossellini’s full ren­di­tion of the tit­u­lar song, a Num­ber One hit in 1963 for Bob­by Vin­ton and a break­out hit in 1951 for Tony Ben­nett. “Par­don the huge qual­i­ty dip (and total mono for aur­al con­sis­ten­cy),” the video’s cre­ator notes, “but short of a new sound­track release using the mas­ter, this is the most com­plete ver­sion of this we’ll be get­ting.”

The images and audio were cob­bled togeth­er from the orig­i­nal 1990 sound­track, Ger­man Film­mak­er Peter Braatz’s 2016 doc­u­men­tary, Blue Vel­vet Revis­it­ed, a VHS copy of the film, and the orig­i­nal film audio. Like Nico, anoth­er heav­i­ly-Euro­pean-accent­ed for­mer mod­el whose monot­o­ne defined a new art move­ment, Rossellini’s tune­less lounge act announced a new sur­re­al­ist aes­thet­ic that would reach the main­stream with Blue Vel­vet’s promi­nence upon its release. The last­ing impact of Lynch’s love of blue on the fol­low­ing decade’s cin­e­ma deserves a study all its own, and we should always mark Blue Vel­vet as the first meet­ing of two artists (two “broth­ers,”  Badala­men­ti says) who did more to mar­ry cin­e­mat­ic col­or and musi­cal mood than per­haps any two col­lab­o­ra­tors in the art form.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Explains How David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet Taught Him the True Mean­ing of Avant Garde Art

The Sur­re­al Film­mak­ing of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

David Lynch Posts His Night­mar­ish Sit­com Rab­bits Online–the Show That Psy­chol­o­gists Use to Induce a Sense of Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis in Research Sub­jects

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In its sec­ond decade, cin­e­ma strug­gled to evolve. The first films by the Lumière Broth­ers and Thomas Edi­son were short and gim­micky — shots of trains rac­ing towards the screen, cou­ples kiss­ing and cute kit­tens get­ting fed. A quick rush. A bit of fun. Its cre­ators didn’t see much past the nov­el­ty of cin­e­ma but then oth­er film­mak­ers like Georges Méliès, Edwin S Porter, Alice Guy-Blaché and D.W. Grif­fith start­ed inject­ing this new medi­um with ele­ments of sto­ry. It start­ed aspir­ing towards art.

To this end, film­mak­ers start­ed to expand the can­vas on which they cre­at­ed. Films that were just two to eight min­utes length­ened in dura­tion as their sto­ries grew in com­plex­i­ty. The first fea­ture-length movie came in 1906 with the Aus­tralian movie The Sto­ry of the Kel­ly Gang.

In 1915, D.W. Grif­fith pre­miered his racist dra­ma The Birth of a Nation, which crys­tal­lized film lan­guage and proved that longer movies could be finan­cial­ly suc­cess­ful. In between those two movies came L’Inferno (1911) – per­haps the finest cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of Dan­te’s Infer­no out there and the first fea­ture-length Ital­ian movie ever.

Like Grif­fith, the mak­ers of L’Inferno — Francesco Bertoli­ni, Adol­fo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro – sought to raise cin­e­ma to the ranks of lit­er­a­ture and the­ater. Unlike Grif­fith, they didn’t real­ly do much to for­ward the lan­guage of cin­e­ma. Through­out L’Inferno, the cam­era remains wide and locked down like the prosce­ni­um of a stage. Instead, they focused their efforts on cre­at­ing glo­ri­ous­ly baroque sets and cos­tumes. Much of the film looks like it was pulled straight from Gus­tave Dorè’s famed illus­tra­tions of The Divine Com­e­dy. Yet see­ing a pic­ture in a book of a demon is one thing. See­ing it leap around lash­ing the naked backs of the damned is some­thing else entire­ly. If you were ever tempt­ed by the sin of simo­ny, you’ll think twice after see­ing this film.

L’Inferno — now added to our col­lec­tion of 1,000+ Free Movies Online — became both a crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial hit world­wide, rak­ing in over $2 mil­lion (rough­ly $48 mil­lion in today’s mon­ey) in the US alone. “We have nev­er seen any­thing more pre­cious and fine than those pic­tures. Images of hell appear in all their great­ness and pow­er,” gushed famed Ital­ian nov­el­ist and reporter Matilde Serao when the film came out.

Amer­i­can film crit­ic for The Mov­ing Pic­ture World, W. Stephen Bush, was even more effu­sive:

“I know no high­er com­men­da­tion of the work than men­tion of the fact that the film-mak­ers have been exceed­ing­ly faith­ful to the words of the poet. They have fol­lowed, in let­ter and in spir­it, his con­cep­tions. They have sat like docile schol­ars at the feet of the mas­ter, con­sci­en­tious­ly and to the best of their abil­i­ty obey­ing every sug­ges­tion for his genius, know­ing no inspi­ra­tion, except such as came from the foun­tain­head. Great indeed has been their reward. They have made Dante intel­li­gi­ble to the mass­es. The immor­tal work, whose beau­ties until now were acces­si­ble only to a small band of schol­ars, has now after a sleep of more than six cen­turies become the prop­er­ty of mankind.”

Of course, the film’s com­bi­na­tion of ghoul­ish­ness and nudi­ty made it ripe to be co-opt­ed by shady pro­duc­ers who had less that lofty motives. Scenes from L’Inferno were cut into such exploita­tion flicks as Hell-O-Vision (1936) and Go Down, Death! (1944).

You can watch the full movie above. Be sure to watch to the end where Satan him­self can be seen devour­ing Bru­tus and Cas­sius.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tave Doré’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. 

There’s no busi­ness like show busi­ness. Or maybe — as Bart Simp­son once wrote on the black­board — “there are plen­ty of busi­ness­es like show busi­ness.”

Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, fol­lows aging TV star, Rick Dal­ton, being pushed into play­ing vil­lain­ous char­ac­ter roles. Drunk and depressed, Dal­ton and his side­kick­/hang­er-on/s­tunt dou­ble Cliff Booth watch reruns of his show and get into a series of increas­ing­ly seri­ous scrapes as the actor search­es for a role that will redeem him. The film’s outline–shorn of his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences that made crit­ics lion­ize it as “a love let­ter to old Hollywood”–sounds sus­pi­cious­ly like anoth­er media prop­er­ty in the mid­dle of its final sea­son that sum­mer.

Called a Mad Men replace­ment, Netflix’s satir­i­cal adult car­toon series Bojack Horse­man also fol­lows an aging for­mer TV star and his sidekicks/hanger(s)-on through their mis­ad­ven­tures in Hol­ly­wood (“Hol­ly­woo”). Along the way they con­front issues that fall under the rubric of “tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty,” such as work­place harass­ment, emo­tion­al imma­tu­ri­ty, and the abuse of pow­er in an indus­try with wild­ly unequal pow­er dynam­ics. The show makes clear that nei­ther old, nor new, Hol­ly­wood deserves a love let­ter — no more than oth­er indus­tries that allow such behav­ior. (It also fea­tures a car­i­ca­ture of Taran­ti­no.)

Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, by con­trast, cel­e­brates the old star sys­tem and its priv­i­leges — or so Richard Brody argues at The New York­er — in an “obscene­ly regres­sive vision of the 60s” that scrubs the decade of its protests and bru­tal crack­downs. The premise under­ly­ing Tarantino’s alter­nate-his­to­ry dram­e­dy seems to be: “If only the old-line Hol­ly­wood peo­ple of the fifties and six­ties had main­tained their pride of place—if only the times hadn’t changed, if only the keys to the king­dom hadn’t been hand­ed over to the free­thinkers and deca­dents of the sixties—then both Hol­ly­wood and the world would be a bet­ter, safer, hap­pi­er place.”

Taran­ti­no sets up “hip­pies,” a favorite pejo­ra­tive of his char­ac­ters, as fall guys for the Man­son Fam­i­ly mur­ders, rather than Manson’s own white suprema­cist beliefs. As many crit­ics not­ed at the time, “the only sub­stan­tial char­ac­ter of col­or, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), is played… as a haughty par­o­dy” who gets “dra­mat­i­cal­ly humil­i­at­ed” by Pitt’s swash­buck­ling stunt­man — who is rumored to have mur­dered his wife and who dis­patch­es the film’s female Man­son cult vil­lains with the sadis­tic glee of a true psy­chopath, a scene, Brody writes, “that only ham­mers [Tarantino’s] doc­trine home.”

Cel­e­bra­tion there may be in the film, but there is also mourn­ing. Christo­pher Hooten at Lit­tle White Lies scoffs at the “love let­ter” idea and sees the film instead as a lament for the end of cinema’s “free­thinkers”:

This is Tarantino’s pas­sion project – poten­tial­ly his last film – and it comes across as him try­ing to sneak out a movie with a ’70s sen­si­bil­i­ty and tone before it’s no longer pos­si­ble. Once the likes of Taran­ti­no and Mar­tin Scors­ese have bowed out, that might well be it for auteur-dri­ven film­mak­ing on a block­buster scale. We’ve reached a polar­i­sa­tion in the indus­try where a direc­tor either works as a hired (and fre­quent­ly fired) gun for a Dis­ney or a Warn­er Bros, or else goes cap in hand in the hope of scrap­ing togeth­er a few mil­lion dol­lars to make some­thing more per­son­al and unique.

The Taran­ti­nos of the world might be a dying breed, but Taran­ti­no isn’t leav­ing his art behind so much as turn­ing his hand to “more per­son­al and unique” projects – in this case a nov­el, and more specif­i­cal­ly, “the pulpi­est of pulp fic­tion — the nov­el­iza­tion,” writes Peter Brad­shaw at The Guardian. Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood: A Nov­el finds him “crank­ing up the back­sto­ries, mulching up real­i­ty and alt.reality pas­tiche, ladling in new episodes,” and flex­ing his for­mi­da­ble strengths as a writer of crack­ling dia­logue and action. The book also promis­es an end­ing view­ers of the film won’t see com­ing.

The nov­el explores the inner lives of its female char­ac­ters, includ­ing, of course, Sharon Tate “and the fic­tion­al child actor Tru­di Fras­er,” and adds an even dark­er edge to Cliff Booth, who is said to admire a cer­tain char­ac­ter despite or because he is “uncon­scious­ly racist, con­scious­ly misog­y­nis­tic.” This is Taran­ti­no, after all, none of whose char­ac­ters are ever shin­ing exam­ples of virtue. But in the post-auteur, post-Wein­stein future, he seems to sug­gest, maybe old-Hol­ly­wood anti-heroes like Cliff Booth and Leonar­do DiCaprio’s washed-up star Rick Dal­ton will only shine on stream­ing TV shows and in the pages of throw­back pulp nov­els, “pack­aged like those New Eng­lish Library paper­backs that used to be on carousel dis­plays in super­mar­kets and drug­stores.” You can pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood: A Nov­el here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness