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SOMEWHERE WITHIN the panicky, popluxe chopshop of Cornel Wilde's berserk movies lie the raw urges of personal, and "primitive," cinema. The Naked Prey, Beach Red, and No Blade of Grass are gashouse fables, rude odysseys of survival whose visual argot is as abrupt, savage, churlish and, finally, infantile as any the movies have ever seen. Wilde's a cave painter, a filmmaker born straight out of primeval ooze with the ideas and beliefs of a rogue hyena deranged by drought.
Watching his work, you may certainly get the sense, as David Thomson memorably suggests, of "watching the first films ever made." What's more, you may sense that an untamed id is being stoked, and you can get a reawakened sense of how deep in our reptile brains the fears, hatreds, and needs of being alive still lurk unappeased by the narcotics of technology, fame, ritual, and entertainment.
For pulp matters. It matters in ways the workaday, incessant discourse about pop culture can never understand. Wilde uses pop-carny strategies to manifest the elemental horror of animateness, and what matters is that in the end they're both the same nervous beast. Contrary to Raymond Durgnat's presumptions in his famous essay on sci-fi cheese, "The Wedding of Poetry and Pulp: Can They Live Happily Ever After and Have Many Beautiful Children?", pulp is hardly the less authentic aesthetic argument (therefore awkwardly mating with "art"), but merely the more ruthless, the more aboriginal. Its downyour-throat tropes and assertions are a hairs-breadth away from expressionism, futurism, surrealism, and cubism, not to mention religious icon art. And if its subjectivism is less schematized, that's because it simply obeys the more commanding voice of the viscera. It therefore resonates with suggestions of a Jungian "collective" in ways high art cannot by its very aspirant nature.
Today, pulp has been sanctified as the lingua franca of modern culture: we all shiver in the discreet taboo-ness of the lowbrow and base. Nostalgically yearning for less sophisticated selves, we convert Jim Thompson and Jack Hill and Jack Kirby and the Ramones into artistesafter-the-fact. We recycle the disposable totems of yesteryear trash into today's supercool postmodernity. It's the ultimate art democracy-those who cannot fathom Umberto Eco or Frank Stella bond instead via Clive Barker and Mobius. Those...