Hippies or beatniks. Sure, it’s like choosing between Lou Gehrig’s Disease and glioblastoma, but it’s a debate that needs settling. Like now. Existing within a mere decade of each other, each sought a vast cultural shift, usually through insufferable poetry, unbearable pretension, and delusions of grandeur bordering on mass psychosis. Needless to say, neither group accomplished an ever-loving thing, except perhaps cementing for all time the maxim that everyone under thirty isn’t worth a damn. Neither are those over thirty, mind you, but at least most of them have the good sense to surrender to apathy. Failing that, surrendering to H.L. Mencken: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.”
The hippies and beatniks, on the other hand, they believed. Dreamed. Told conformity to go to hell while offering a substitute that made conventionality look like Shangri-La. One tendered open mic nights, black turtlenecks, and incomprehensible prose, the other a lack of bathing and boundaries as a middle finger to militarism. Fashionable existentialism or levitating the Pentagon. Maybe it’s just easier to declare a tie and go to bed.
Enter Maxwell Brock. As envisioned by legendary shlock-meister Roger Corman, he is the eternal stand-in for an entire era. A mercifully brief era, but an era nonetheless. Against the odds, it even made the history books. Lording over the Yellow Door Café like a bearded Mao, he pontificates with such abandon, he can’t even sigh without extending it into a four-hour lecture. He’s the kind of man who, when faced with bigotry and famine, promises a sturdy stanza or two to set things right. A letter to the editor to at last render silent the very dogs of war. A stern look and arched eyebrow as the trains leave for the camps.
Take the following gem of a retort, just prior to spending the better part of an evening in humorless detachment: “I refuse to say anything twice…Repetition is death.” Anyone with a modicum of courage would challenge such patent nonsense, but the endless finger snapping would inevitably drown out the opposition. He’s a god within these walls, and whether droning on while a sad saxophone accompanies his world salad, or bellowing pronouncements like a 17th century monarch, he’s beyond reproach. The only shaft of light in a world gone dark. Though as much as he talks, he’s bound to violate his own mantra.
Fortunately, writer/director Roger Corman, despite his genetic predisposition to make all movies for under $100, doesn’t take him seriously. Not for one beret-wearing minute. He’d rather, in his roundabout way, stoke the flames of winking knowingness and suggest that, even within the confines of a B-movie nuthouse, the youngsters got it wrong. Almost always, but especially here. After all, Mr. Brock, among his endless catalog of sins, helps transform a serial killer into a folk hero. An artiste. The greatest thing since Kerouac himself. All because one man’s opinion couldn’t possibly be wrong. Yep, as expected, the most poisonous strain of authoritarianism is exactly where you suspect it to be – smack dab in the bosom of the counterculture.
The story, wickedly conceived and executed in barely an hour, concerns nitwit Walter Paisley, a no-account busboy who could no more impress Brock’s minions than seduce a mannequin. Like so many of his type, he longs to create but hasn’t the talent to express even the simplest of ideas. He dreams of working in clay, but he’ll have to settle for Play-Doh. Then, one fateful night, he hears the landlady’s cat screaming within the walls of his cold water flat. Seeking to liberate the grouchy puss from its prison, he stabs the wall with a knife. As expected, this not only doesn’t bring about a rescue, it kills the feline with a single thrust. As he opens up the wall, he discovers a stone-stiff corpse, as if the cat had been entombed for a decade. Realism aside, it sets Walter’s fate in motion. He shall cover the body in clay and create a plaster masterpiece!
Presenting the cat, knife still attached, to Maxwell and the café crew, he is hailed as a visionary. What talent! What boldness! So lifelike! It’s what we always suspected about much of the art world: few and far between are the pieces that matter, but if you successfully manufacture excitement, the dollars and accolades will follow. What it means, well, means even less. Maxwell likes, and Maxwell wins. Every single time. And when you’re the sort of man who utters, “Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of art,” you’re not about to accept a contradictory remark. While the crowd is trying to figure out what you just said, you’ve made off with the cash register.
Walter, needing to feed his fragile ego, ups the stakes further by killing on purpose for a change. First, a nosy cop. Then a busty bimbo who dared mock his alleged genius. Both are butchered, covered in clay, and presented to the awestruck Yellow Door clientele. Gasps of gullibility perhaps, but soon there’s talk of an exhibition. Money to burn. My God, we might even have a new movement. Something else to hang our hat on once Maxwell’s throat runs dry. Leave it to him, and we very well might turn this thing into a cult.
Maxwell, as pretentious and obnoxious as they come, wins our hearts because, at bottom, he is the very beginning, middle, and end of everything the beatniks hath wrought. He was present at the creation, and just as responsible for its Dodo-like disappearance from the world stage. Maybe, after all, its energies were channeled into the flower power that decidedly failed to stop war, racism, and inequality to such an extent that the lion’s share of its adherents either sold out to Wall Street or self-immolated in Greenwich Village townhouses. You just knew peace and love were merely bombs and bullets in disguise. Change is hard. Chaos is easy.
Even Maxwell’s breakfasts are a reflection of a miserable soul. “What are you having?” he’s asked. For most, Corn Flakes and maybe some stale toast. For his highness? “Some soy and wheat germ pancakes, organic guava nectar, calcium lactate and tomato juice, and garbanzo omelettes sprinkled with smoked yeast.” To add insult to injury, he spits, “Join us?” Like asking a man to take part in a game of Russian Roulette. And no one not wanting to be separated from his teeth would dare string such words together in public, let alone claim to be ingesting them as an actual meal. He’s the ultimate blowhard, masquerading as a revolutionary.
No one knew that more than Roger Corman. He spent the better part of his 98 years holding up a mirror to America’s failings, but he knew he’d have to get creative if he wanted to convince actors and cameramen to work for the spare change he pulled from his couch. Get too lofty, the reels stay locked up at the studio. But horror and the macabre were easy. And cheap. Preach and they stay away. Hide your wisdom in blood and gore, you’ll have staying power. And unlike, say, Ed Wood or Bert Gordon, he managed to serve up reasonably passable talent both onscreen and behind the scenes. A little touch of class at bargain basement prices. Which is also why his work endures. And provokes. And sends us memorable madmen like Maxwell Brock, a true museum piece worthy of rediscovery. The ultimate inside joke for a generation that thought it knew better.
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