Mouse Heaven

Saw it again the other day for the fourth time with years interspersed in between, and again the exuberance was there: tell me, how Kenneth Anger does it?

Something of the effortlessness of a great master is here; being in his late seventies when he made this, it is a lesson in casualness and one hell of a crisp build-up this viewer has ever witnessed:

In retrospect, one can sense some structure into this: divided in four sections, this can be read like the introduction to cinema, then the talkies, then shift to its creepy, glorious, puppet cultural stature, which comes in full gears in the last part:

when the Jeff Koons-like mirrored Mickeys appear on screen accompanied by The Proclaimers' great "Joyful Kilmarnock Blues", this transcends memorabilia, nostalgia, jots of creepiness and mock atmosphere, the collecting thrust and becomes a display of verve that is unfair to appropriate as retro.

This is what movies are for, and Kenneth Anger knows it and plays with it in this great ten minutes pop poem of his.

Thank you.

I guess I can't blame Kenneth Anger fans for looking for something weird and menacing in here, or looking for a statement on consumerism or something like that, but aside from some disturbing old footage of what appears to be a merry go round out of control, this is more cute than anything else. Seriously, you can watch it with your kids. They'll love it.

Toy Mickey Mouses come walking across the screen, wink at the camera, and so on, while popular music through the ages plays. People are always looking for evil in Mickey Mouse, and I'm as sensitive to consumerism and jingoism and corporate excess as anyone else and try as I might, I simply cannot find anything *evil* about Mickey Mouse or any kind of statement in this film. I tried, I really did. I've seen Invocation of My Demon Brother. I've *seen* Lucifer Rising and I just can't connect that sensibility here. There are some things identifiably Kenneth Anger here - something about the way things are filmed that I can't put my finger on, as well as the music choices (which made me recall Rabbit's Moon for some reason). But nothing immediately psychedelic or, you know, um, Thelemic.

As far as I can tell, this is a filmmaker having a bit of fun with an icon familiar to just about everyone.

It's Mickey! Lots of them! In many forms! Dancing, singing, and so on. And that's about it. I liked the film, frankly. It was whimsical and fun. I guess if you have it in you to really hate Mickey Mouse, you'll see something else here. But man I just don't have any room left in my heart to hate Mickey. Or plastic representations of Mickey.