Boys Beware: Paranoid Childhood (An unfinished piece)

(This is an incomplete post. Just felt the ned to publish now because, fuck I don't know)

Welcome, to another installment of "Nick has way too much time on his hands and needs a job." Was Dance Little Children not enough to scare you off from heavy petting? Did Perversion for Profit not make you want to throw your dirty magazines out lest it gives the Commies an inch? Well then, prepared to have your blue pants brown from Boys Beware.

Boys Beware, which is either a good way to get a laugh at, or kicked out of, a West Hollywood party, is a 1961 mental hygiene scare film, ostensibly about keeping away from sexual predators, but really its message boils down to "THE HOMOS ARE GONNA KILL YOU AND RAPE YOUR CORPSE!!!" And it's only a bit less loud about it than that. It's a very, odd time capsule to the 1950s era, in regard to how people thought of LGBT persons. And this was shown in schools for kids, soooooooooo, that, says something about the filmmakers. Not something good, mind you. Wonder if the scare film approach of the 50s contributed to the cultural shifts and rebellions of the 60s, like, kids were constantly being made to be scared of sex, the A-bomb, Commies, driving, etc. Anyway, the film was made by Los Angeles filmmaker Sid Davis, who formerly worked as a stand-in for John Wayne before making a film called The Dangerous Stranger. And thus a legend was born, creating a world of shock films for kids that were frequently lower in budget than a Daniel Johnston album. Wait, that's not fair, he's actually good and all that, uh, lower budget than one of those audition tapes I upload for, wait, that doesn't work either. Dang it, what is something low budget that people would know? And why does my cat have to plop down right on the space in front of the mousepad so I can't use it? Man, why can't it be like the early 60s, you could buy a house for 5000 dollars, write a few porno novels for a paperback publisher in a weekend and pay it off, maybe get a sales boost form George Putnam? instead I'm living with my parents because I'm a college graduate, but I got loans and no one is hiring history majors. Why didn't I work to go to CalArts? Anyway, back to the film. Before we begin, just have to point out that it looks, like no one who actually made it ever met a gay guy in their lives, or at least knowingly. Which seems to be a common thread back then. (Hey, it just hit me, why didn't I do a Boogie Nights joke in the Perversion for Profit article? Man, I am not on the ball lately.)

The film opens with a title card for Sid Davis Productions, oh and if you notice I AM using a crappy print for the images this time. Sorry about that. The plot is, well there's no plot, more vignettes out of a 90s indie film, all focused on adolescent boys who become victims of "homosexuals" who inevitably become molested or dead. It begins with a  "Pornographic pictures", if only Porno Larry and Mr. lawson were here to get rid of them.

The look and feel of the film is very, Sid Davis, let's put it that way.  It's this kind of noir, sunlight-baked Southern California suburban hellscape, like if someone made Last Year at Marienbad in Orange County. By the way, Marienbad, film I don't really care to fully watch. But yeah, we see things like beaches and forest ponds for fishing, but the most of it is tract housing, a few parks and such, all under a bleached sky. One major thing about this film is how, in relation to the time period it was made in, portrayed gay guys as hebephile child molesters and murderers, which I am sure scared more than a few kids up to the present day. // There are other versions of the film, made in the 70s, and it's interesting, maybe to compare and contrast with historical context like the Briggs Initiative. But this is easily the most famous one, and frankly after the two films last time, kind of not interested in covering multiple films at once. (Insert obligatory three-way joke here)

Dr Strangelove: Descent?

Now, keep in mind this is not a film essay per se, had to write enough of those in UCLA for really annoying film history professors (William Marotti if anyone wants to know), but I want to point out that one can easily make the argument that there is a kind of theme, intentional or unintentional, of a kind of primal descent, into madness. And I don't really feel like writing a whole thing, so, this just will be a bunch of incomplete stuff, there's a lot of stuff missing in between I just don't care to fill out.

For example, in the first minutes of the film there's more a presentation, akin to a stoic Cold War official film. This is seen with the narration, only heard in the beginning of the film. At the start, after a disclaimer on the USAF's position on the events of the film, a voice suddenly comes up, almost like a government film or newsreel: "For more than a year, ominous rumors have been privately circulating among high level western leaders, that the Soviet Union had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon, a doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Russian project to the perpetually fog shrouded wasteland below the arctic peaks of the Zokov islands. What they were building, or why it should be located in a such a remote and desolate place, no one could say." This voice returns as the planes are seen: "In order to guard against surprise nuclear attack, America's Strategic Air Command maintains a large force of B-52 bombers airborne 24 hours a day. Each B-52 can deliver a nuclear bombload of 50 megatons, equal to 16 times the total explosive force of all the bombs and shells used by all the armies in World War Two. Based in America, the Airborne alert force is deployed from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic Ocean, but they have one geographical factor in common: they are all two hours from their targets inside Russia."

This detached manner starts to fade as the film goes on. By the middle, Group Captain Mandrake stays relatively sane as he realizes General Ripper is bombing Russia because of his impotence, and manages to get through to the president with the codes while the War Room plans for disaster. By the ending act, there is no Mandrake or buildings on the ground. It's the B52 and the underground shelter. On the plane, Kong goes riding the phallic bomb into oblivion, while the military and civilian leadership are now down in a dark place. Suddenly eager to the ideas of Strangelove, for a almost-fantasy version of the apocalypse where they can be polygamous to heart's content, free of previous constraints.

There was more but, cat got on the desk and I lost my train of thought.

A Seinfeld Theory (well more a fan fic)

So I was thinking, in two episodes of the series Seinfeld, George Costanza mentions having a brother, who is never brought up again. To solve this discrepancy, I propose this: Danny Costanza, George's older brother. Basically a taller, more charismatic version of George who their parents liked more. Unfortunately, when he was around 16 and George was about 12, George convinced him have sex with the girlfriend of a guy who turned out to be a highly-connected local hood. So Dan fled for his life, eventually landing in San Francisco in the mid-60s. And he never really wanted to go back to the insanity of home life in Queens, including insulting Frank on the phone on his 18th birthday. Obviously this has soem resentment for George from the parents, but he still on occasion talked to George.