"I'm here and I want action!" - The Brain Eaters

In a 1958 film directed by Bruno VeSota for Roger Corman's American International Pictures, a mysterious spate of killings in a small town in Illinois begins with the sudden appearance of what is initially taken to be an alien spacecraft. There is even mention of sightings of a flaming chariot in the sky, recalling the Biblical tale of Elijah. 

It eventually transpires, however, that the small bug-like creatures, which have begun attaching themselves parasitically to the local populace and taking over their brains, are not extraterrestrials but antediluvian throwbacks to the carboniferous period. Their craft has not fallen down from the sky but tunneled up from the earth after 200 million years beneath the surface, here to offer the planet's current residents the "gift" of a "utopia" based on logic and universal harmony - by force, if necessary. Intriguingly, their fifty-foot-tall, spiral transport bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Tatlin's famous monument to the third international.

The creatures - which were apparently handmade by producer Ed Nelson himself using some old wind-up toys, a bit of fur from an old coat, and two pipe cleaners - work systematically, taking over the brains of the local government, the police, and finally the media. It is at this point, when we realise the local radio producer is also One Of Them, that the identity of composer "Tom Jonson" - a man with no other IMDB credits apart from this film - is brought rather sharply into question by a rather glaring needle-drop from the third act vorspiel to Tristan und Isolde. 

The plot was considered sufficiently similar to a Robert Heinlein novel called The Puppet Masters to justify an out of court settlement. But Heinlein's novel is set in a far future 2007, several years after a nuclear war and amidst continued tension between opposing East and West powers. In Heinlein's novel the creatures are aliens - from Titan, one of Saturn's moons - but their resemblance to slugs and the way they attach themselves to their human hosts at the base of the necks makes the link pretty close.  In Robert Rodriguez's film, The Faculty, one of the characters notes that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a "blatant rip off" of this novel of Heinlein's.

There is a very peculiar atmosphere all the way through this film. The strange gaps in logic and continuity combine with an excessive use of dry ice, dutch angles, and often superfluous voice-over to leave the film teetering precariously between Ed Wood-esque unintentional self-parody and a genuinely dream-like driftwork. Director VeSota worked mostly as an actor and ended up playing a series of barmen in various TV westerns. But three years before The Brain Eaters he had written and directed (uncredited) one of the strangest films of the fifties: the dialogue-free noir thriller, Dementia, for which George Antheil provided one of his very best film scores.

The latter film was banned by the New York Board of Censors until the year Brain Eaters was released, three years later, when it limped out with meagre distribution, a poor substitute soundtrack, and an entirely pointless voice-over explaining what's going on at every step. It slowly developed a place in cult fandom, however, thanks firstly to being the picture being shown in the cinema in The Blob, and, much later, a glowing review in the RE/Search Incredibly Strange Films issue. It seems the whole thing is now available to watch on YouTube.

"When Bill Cosby chastises you, you forget that you're grown."

One of the best bits in Eddie Murphy's Raw is a skit early on in which Murphy recounts being chastised on the telephone by Bill Cosby for using so much foul language doing stand-up. Afterwards Murphy calls Richard Pryor, "And Richard was like, 'Tell Bill Cosby to suck my dick!'" The way he gets, just perfectly the vocal mannerisms of Cosby, and especially Pryor, betrays hours spent studying their records as a child. The mimicry is all in the voice - he doesn't really get them physically. It's a little like what Simon Reynolds is talking about in The Guardian - a portrait of the artist as a consumer. A similar thing happens towards the end of Woody Allen's much-maligned homage to the Hollywood musical, Everyone says I love you (the title itself is a homage to the Marx Brothers). Interestingly, it's all set up by the music: a scene before features an instrumental snatch of 'You brought a new kind of love to me', the song each of the three Marx Brothers sing in order to impersonate Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business, next a big musical set-piece opens with a couple of dozen dancers, all dressed as Groucho, singing 'Hooray for Captain Spaulding' (from Animal Crackers) in French. Then we have Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, talking intimately with Groucho disguises on, in the midst of a party where everyone has a Groucho mask. The dialogue itself is very Woody Allen but just a few times Woody throws in a few smirks and raised eyebrows that are just perfectly Groucho, betraying exactly the same obsessive watching and re-watching of old Marx Brothers films as Eddie Murphy with his Richard Pryor records. Curiously, when a comic pays his respects to another comic, he borrows the style and mannerisms (form) but not the actual gags (content), whereas a band will tend to cover another band's song (content) but will be expected to do so in there own style (form). Of course, there is a certain taboo amongst stand-ups around 'stealing' another comic's material and doing impressions is a common feature in comedy routines, whereas musicians are expected to develop their own style, their own 'voice', but playing covers is accepted as educative. However, what happens in a hypothetical situation in which Eddie Murphy is doing an impression of Bill Cosby chastising him for using swear words in his act, and as Cosby chastises Murphy he starts to impersonate him, so we have Murphy impersonating Cosby impersonating Murphy. Or what if the specific bit of Murphy's act that Cosby has a problem with is the bit where he does an impression of Bill Cosby, so we end up with Murphy doing an impression of Cosby doing an impression of Murphy doing an impression of Cosby ad infinitum. We find ourselves back in the territory of Douglas Hofstadter's 'strange loops'. How might this work in music? Already, with Allo Darlin', we have a kind of meta-music, a music with other music nested within it. If I (or, even better, Johnny Cash) were to then cover 'Heart Beat Chilli' with its reference to 'I Walk the Line', then we reach a kind of meta-meta-level, but still not the kind of tangled hierarchies we find in Gödel, Escher, Bach. 

These kinds of Epimenidean structures turn up a lot in marxism - Vladimir Tatlin's Escher-like Monument to the Third International springs immediately to mind. Or take Zizek's analysis of the relationship between politics and economics (in In Defense of Lost Causes), such that politics is determined in the last instance by the economy, but by an economy which is itself a political-economy, an economics imbedded in, and imbued with, politics. Of course, Zizek delights in seeming paradoxes like this, but it is interesting to see these kind of self-referential loops turn up even in the critics of marxism. Doesn't Simone Weil's image, for her critique of the logic of proletarian auto-liberation, of a horse riding itself, recall somewhat Escher pictures such as 'Drawing Hands'?