"Beware
of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep."
Some might argue that
there's a fine line between genius, as a concept, and insanity, as an actual
condition, but Glen or Glenda (1953) is a film that goes some lengths towards
establishing this particular line of thought as a genuine rule. As a filmmaker,
the legendary Edward D. Wood Jr. was famously considered to be "the worst
director in the world"; an unnecessarily cruel legacy initially established
by the Medved Brothers before subsequently being carried along by the bozos
behind the Golden Raspberry "Awards" and later the makers of the boring
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1989 - present). Certainly there are moments in
Glen or Glenda that might suggest such a title is justified, if not a factual
truth; however, if we break away from the accepted narrative for just a second
and look at the film from a different perspective, there are treasures to be
found here.
In 1957, François Truffaut
wrote the following: "The films of the future will be more personal than
autobiography, like a confession or a diary. Young filmmakers will speak in the
first person in order to tell what happened to them: their first love, a
political awakening, a trip, an illness, and so on. Tomorrow's film will be an
act of love." In 1953, Edward D. Wood Jr. was already an embodiment of the
same philosophy. Glen or Glenda is pure chaotic cinema. It's clunky, poorly
acted, choppily edited and makes no dramatic sense whatsoever; but it's also
transgressive, forward-thinking and deeply personal to the point of biography.
Glen or Glenda [Edward D.
Wood Jr., 1953]:
Throughout Glen or Glenda Wood
wrestles with ideas of sexuality and gender identity decades before mainstream
filmmakers would ever dare to broach such complex themes. His experiences in
World War II, his suburban upbringing, his passion for old monster movies and
his deeply complicated relationships with women are each woven in and around
the film as if it were a kind of dream or nightmare being conjured up by its
wily narrator. The film blurs elements of genre movie, melodrama and
documentary (the use of found-footage specifically could be seen as a precursor
to Jean-Luc Godard's similar appropriation of second-hand footage in
Histoire(s) du cinema [1988-1998], or even Orson Welles's use of stock-footage in his
masterpiece F for Fake [1973]), while at the same time seesawing wildly between
the "grindhouse" or exploitation traditions and something more avant-garde.
While it's easy to balk at
the following suggestion, I've often felt that the line between Glen or Glenda
and the later films by David Lynch is incredibly faint. This isn't in any way
meant to imply that Wood is as great a filmmaker as Lynch, or that Lynch is as
deficient a filmmaker as Wood (depending on where your personal preferences lie),
but that there is something in the presentation of Wood's film that finds an
affinity in Lynch's own aesthetic; something that comes from the same collision
between nostalgic cornball Americana and the filmmaker's own subconscious, with
its darkness and perversions. The kinship for moments of stilted performance,
with wooden line delivery and dialog that reads as unnatural, affected and
loaded with metaphor, or that Wood's film plays like a deconstruction of a
conventional 1950s Hollywood melodrama, with its rosy cheeked, clean-cut,
"aww shucks!" innocence subverted as the darker underbelly of the
human condition reveals itself, can't help but feel like precursors to Lynch's
later masterworks, such as Blue Velvet (1986), or the original series of Twin
Peaks (1989-1991).
In particular, the
nightmare sequence from Wood's film - with its low-frequency soundtrack, its cross
dissolves, its use of doubles and doppelgangers, its sexual violence, its
continued motif of characters emerging from shadows and fog, and its ghostly
devil figure (that could be the Woodsman from Twin Peaks: The Return [2017]) - is
absolutely redolent of the Lynchian aesthetic. That such sequences were by all
accounts included at the behest of the film's producer, George Weiss, doesn't
lessen the unique nature of the film or the sense of it being a personal
expression for its director, but rather illustrate the collaborative nature of
filmmaking and the malleability of "auteurism" as a genuine theory.
Glen or Glenda [Edward D.
Wood Jr., 1953]:
Twin Peaks: The Return -
Part 8 [David Lynch, 2017]:
Wood's subsequent films, such
as Bride of the Monster (1955) and the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959),
do more to highlight the deficiencies in the filmmaker's abilities. Robbed of
the personal or eccentric touches of the film in question, these later works
show Wood as a director attempting to cash-in on the popular trends (plainly
speaking, atomic-age science fiction) and finding himself undone by his own comparative
limitations. The films lose sight of the individuality explicit in a work like
Glen or Glenda, reverting instead to the standard genre tropes and clichés
already used (and used well) by better filmmakers. While Glen or Glenda is
frequently thrown in with the rest of Wood's work as being incompetent, its
lack of technical ability, its low-budget nature and the occasional toadying to
exploitation shouldn't be seen as barriers to appreciating the film for its strange
imagery, bizarre tone and earnest personal commentary.
