Mesa of Lost Women: Big Bug meets Sexploitation

Mesa of Lost Women (1953) is an odd film that incorporates a mad scientist into a new setting: a Southwest desert that may broach other environmental issues, including water rights and oil exploitation but falls short. To underpin these possible themes, the film opens on a couple seemingly lost in a large Mexican desert. An oil surveyor watches them with binoculars and declares that in this desert of death, “produced by roasting the human eye” they will not be living things for long. The desert will convert them into dead things. They are taken to the AmerMexico Hospital. The man wakes up in the oil company office and tells them to blow them up before they scatter without explaining what “they” are. Firebombs are the only things that scare them, he claims as he mutters about super monsters or bugs as big as we are and bite, and claims they come from an underground lab where Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan) does something to their glands. Only the Mexican assistant Pepe (Chris Pin-Martin) believes him when he talks about the misshapen women that do not die.

The film flashes back a year before to fill in the gaps. Women and a male assistant are in an underground lab. Another scientist, Dr. Masterson (Harmon Stevens) is visiting Dr. Aranya, who is studying the arterial lobe of the pituitary gland and producing “things” through experimental transplants. The women in the lab have braided hair, suggesting a change, and another woman is lying on a lab table, presumably ready for an experiment. Aranya explains that he has isolated the growth hormone of the pituitary and will transfer it into the body of another creature, a hexapod, a tarantula, and transfer the glands from the insect back into the human body, so the woman is indestructible. According to Aranya, they can grow a new limb if lost. Only women are chosen because, as Aranya declares, “in the insect world the male is puny is insignificant,” as is the doctor’s male assistant. The women are spiders with thinking brains subject to the doctor’s will, we are told.

Masterson is disturbed by the doctor’s plans, but Aranya now cannot let him leave. Instead, Masterson becomes another experimental subject. He looks around in  a montage of memories. Eventually Masterson escapes from the hospital and ends up at a bar near the old lab where Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), one of the spider women, dances. Masterson shoots Tarantella, but because she is now “indestructible” she recovers quickly. Masterson and his tablemates end up near the underground lab when their plane flies off course, and only the pilot and a woman with a weak fiancé escape. They are the couple picked up by the oil surveyor. The pilot is telling the story, and the woman awakes. Only Pepe believes the story. He wants to burn them because nothing will survive fire, but the film ends with ambiguity, since the man may be an unreliable narrator.

Ultimately, Mesa of Lost Women argues against the genetic transformation Aranya successfully attempts in his lab, but it leaves the resolution to the conflicts such transformation provides unresolved. Other environmental issues, including water rights and oil exploration, become mere setting and plot devices in this peculiar mixed genre film. By combining a big bug movie with a sexploitation theme and dropping it into a Mexican setting, however, Mesa of Lost Women stands out. Eric Kurerston perhaps puts it best:

The "music" is so pervasive, so repetitive, and so grating, it becomes good enough that Ed Wood re-used it for Jail Bait. Is Mesa bad-brilliant or just bad? What would Warhol say? What would Godard say? They'd just shake their heads at you contemptuously for not getting the modernist cosmic joke. Mesa of Lost Women needs no justification! C'est un meisterwerke!

Film Is Dead?

 In the Sept. 9, 2012 issue of The New York Times Arts and Leisure section, an essay co-written by the papers two primary film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O.Scott, riff off the title Film Is Dead? Their concern is over the rapid technological and economic change from the photo chemical process of creating and projecting moving images to a computer generated/digital process.

Their cultural/aesthetic concerns focus on how this overwhelming change will affect the quality of the screened image, and while championing the look of celluloid, the critics are careful to explain that the switch to digital is here and has particular advantages, along with a host of problems. This new wave will transform both economic and aesthetic practices within the industry and influence film/digital audiences around the world.

While the critics thoughtfully examine the potential aesthetic changes that they see occurring they never once consider the enormous positive change that will take place in the "deep ontological and phenomenological shifts that are transforming a medium." That change involves the enormously reduced environmental and ecological impact produced by the 19th and 20th century industrial practices of the photo chemical process of creating celluloid and the finished film product and the energy required to deliver such a product to world wide audiences. From this perspective digital production, distribution and exhibition is a quantum leap in reducing the destructive chemical/carbon  footprint that has dominated the film industry since the 1890's. What is reduced in this switch from the film process to the digital process that an overwhelmingly majority of film critics refuse to analyze and write about?

The production process of celluloid itself involves the enormous use of water, chemicals and energy. The process of turning celluloid into "film" involves more of the same. Many of these chemicals turn into waste products that have been polluting the environment for over a 100 years. The eco-damage caused by the total film production process is hard to calculate but studies done examining the effects of  Kodak's film production processing in Rochester has been well documented by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell. The creation and ultimate processing of celluloid around the world has contributed to many pollution problems which will be eliminated  by the digital takeover. Chemicals, of course, are involved with the process of film making from the initial creation of celluloid, to the processing of the negative, to the work prints and ultimately the finished prints that are shown in theaters. The final destruction of millions of film prints over the century has also produced a variety of enviro/eco disasters. All this disappears with the introduction of digital. For example, despite the environmental costs of hardware and servers, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows diverted 756 tons of film waste from landfill with a recovery rate of 98.4 percent and saved 2500 tons of C02 from being emitted by using Greenshoot and adopting green practices throughout the production, and saved money through Greenshoot's services into the production.

The distribution process which requires enormous carbon expenditures to deliver thousands of bulky prints to theaters all over the world also is eliminated by digital. Digital "films" are now delivered by dvd's, or hard drives or by transmitting signals by satellite. It is hard to calculate the final reduction of carbon by eliminating delivering celluloid, but the film industry which sometimes spend 3 million dollars for the physical production and physical delivery of the prints for just one film, is seeing an enormous decrease in the costs of distribution. This inspires the industry to move more quickly to digital since they readily see the new profits to be made by no longer having to pay for the creation of film prints and the enormous costs of delivering them and eliminating them after their value has ended. The final area of exhibition is also influenced by digital. With the removal of bulky film, new projectors and new means of transmitting images to audiences have reduced the costs of theater owners who, of course, share in distribution expenses.

The rise of digital may produce a flood of aesthetic questions, but from the perspective of the ecofilm critic, it is a new age that reveals a potential reduction in pollution and environmental damage that makes it well worth any anxiety over the new viewing experience that vexes so many mainstream film critics today.

Rango beginning

Current Westerns continue to draw on the drive for resources that is at the center of many earlier western films. A truly American film genre, the Western is regaining its status. The popular and critical success of the True Grit (2010) remake demonstrates the resurgence of this genre that builds on Americans’ hunger for their history and the promise of progress provided there. Although the narrative of True Grit focuses primarily on a revenge plot, it also highlights both a savage landscape that invites the “taming” civilization can provide and, in the characters of Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), illustrates the pioneer spirits necessary to settle a Wild West.

Rango (2011), however, most deliberately addresses environmental issues as it both elucidates the environmental history surrounding water rights in the American desert and critiques current water rights practices in the Las Vegas area. In an obvious homage to Chinatown noted by critics from Time Magazine to Salon.Com, Rango explores a hero’s attempts to “save a parched Old West-style town from the depredations of water barons and developers” (O’Hehir “Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation”). With help from a variety of anthropomorphized western characters, Rango (Johnny Depp) successfully returns water to the desert, defeating the water baron mayor (Ned Beatty) and rehabilitating his henchman, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy).

Rango illustrates the continuing influence of the western genre and its environmental underpinnings. The film’s historical narrative, however, is also connected with the contemporary world Rango seems to leave behind when he is thrown out of his human family’s car because the mayor seeks to recreate a desert paradise similar to Las Vegas and its surrounding golf courses, a connection that reinforces the enduring effects of both the western genre and the environmental history that grounds it. By both integrating innovative CGI and animation techniques from Industrial Light and Magic and translating the film’s narrative to a videogame format, Rango  also  effectively demonstrates the ongoing effects of the Desert Land Act and the exploitation of water rights it sometimes encouraged.