Author: Mark Athitakis

Last August, a graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report was published, and the media did what they always do when they notice cartoon artists taking on serious themes. They freaked. “Yes, that’s right, a comic about the attacks is set for publication,” gasped Bravetta Hassell of the Washington Post. “Is the most defining moment of a generation in danger of becoming just another franchise with a Happy Meal tie-in on the horizon?” fretted Vaughn Ververs, editor of CBS News’ Public Eye blog. Wringing her hands, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller wrote, “I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad idea to treat serious subjects in terms of comic book art, if such works represent an advance or a retreat for civilization.” Her story was headlined “Are you ready for this?”—as if we, as a culture, could withstand 9/11 itself but might go to pieces if we happened to experience drawings of it.

All that keening was the product of a common but false assumption: that comic art is inherently a children’s medium. There’s ample proof to the contrary, of course—the works of Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alan Moore, to pick just three relatively recent examples. But in a capitalist consumer society, those with the money usually get to define the terms under which a culture operates, and Spiegelman’s Maus has never stood a chance against the Mouse. Walt Disney, more than any one person, developed the grammar of modern cartoon art, and thanks to his studio, he remains the chief influence on the way the average citizen consumes and understands this medium. Critics have given him hell for that: In his 1968 book, The Disney Version, Richard Schickel eviscerated his subject for turning his art into a kiddieland and dismissed the Disney oeuvre as “mostly a horror.”

And Schickel wasn’t alone; his assessment of Disney as a sort of Hitler of wholesomeness remains pervasive. But in his mammoth new biography of Disney, Neal Gabler makes a solid case for his subject as a middlebrow but mature artist, a not-just-for-kids artist, and, in his own way, an occasionally not-for-kids artist. Perhaps as important as his stance, Gabler assumes it without sounding like a company man. A rightfully acclaimed and observant writer on celebrity and film history, he scored unprecedented access to the Disney Archives to research the book, and while he’s not as aggressive as Schickel was, Gabler doesn’t pull his punches, either. In the closing chapters, Disney is a compromised man who’s quite distant from the aspiring animator struggling in Kansas City in the 1920s; his ambition never wavered, but what he was ambitious about changed radically. Heartened by the success of Disneyland in 1955, Disney had all but abandoned animation and plotted to expand his family-entertainment empire by purchasing land in Florida that would become Walt Disney World. By 1966, shortly before his death, his studio was dealing in cheap, unchallenging family fare like Pollyanna and That Darn Cat. The saddest scene in Gabler’s book describes how Disney would regularly call the Sherman Brothers into his office, demanding to hear the songwriting team perform “Feed the Birds,” their melancholy, elegiac tune from Mary Poppins. “Play it!” Disney would order, staring blankly out the window. The brothers would, and their boss wept every time.

So, what happened to the person who could spearhead a clever Depression-era allegory like Three Little Pigs, or pull off a technical triumph like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? The cheery, safe Disney style resulted in part from the economic realities with which its creator was forced to reckon. During World War II, Disney dropped much of what he was working on to make government-subsidized films. Plus, a unionization effort among the studio’s animators put a crimp in his obsessively improving ways. These occurrences, thoroughly and compellingly detailed in a chapter titled “Two Wars,” kneecapped aesthetics as a prime consideration at the studio. By the mid-50s, Disney was more concerned with his revolutionary new theme park, and the kiddie TV show explicitly designed to promote it, than with promoting cartooning as a complicated art. Once both those projects became hits, the quality of Disney’s films was even less of an issue.

Before all that, Disney had made legitimate claims to art that few thought to dismiss as kid stuff. He was proud of his 1946 collaboration with Salvador Dali on Destino, a short that was finished, posthumously, in 2003. And though critics split on his 1940 film, Fantasia, they never argued about whether Disney’s ambitious pairing of animation with classical music was fit for adult consumption. Nor did they question whether a film so abstracted was fit for the cartoon form. Indeed, when Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were released, arguments often revolved around whether they were fit for children. (When Disney’s four-year-old daughter, Diane, attended a screening of Snow White, she watched it through her fingers and was eventually escorted out when she started bawling.) Disney’s main flaw prior to his post-World War II decline wasn’t his hokeyness but his intense perfectionism—his efforts to keep “plussing” (i.e., improving) his animations and his continuous, abject fear of getting stale. Admitting he overreached with Fantasia, Disney said, a decade later: “Every time I’ve made a mistake is when I went in a direction where I didn’t feel the thing actually. And I did try to be a little smarty-pants.”

In the late 30s, being a smarty-pants was part of the Disney gospel; it wasn’t until after the war that Disney came to embody middle-class values for postwar America. Still, he was never comfortable with his assigned role as a purveyor of cuteness. In real life, Disney didn’t much resemble Uncle Walt; if anything, he was antisocial and often neglected his wife and daughters to concentrate on the studio. Disney was a bona fide artist for a time, Gabler argues, citing Snow White, Steamboat Willie, and Three Little Pigs as works of art. That contention runs counter to the claims of many of Gabler’s colleagues (the eminent critic David Thomson calls Snow White “pretty pablum”), but even Disney’s harshest critical enemies have laid down their arms when it comes to the technical achievements that those first features represented. More than anything, those movies stand as arguments that animation is a medium where anything is possible, and in Fantasia and abstracted shorts like The Skeleton Dance, Disney endeavored to prove it. “This is not the cartoon medium,” he told a colleague during the making of Fantasia. “It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here.” It was a great mission statement at the time, and it’s a shame that Disney’s own work ultimately contradicted it; the world he wound up conquering was a small one after all.

Disney would probably blanch at much of what’s contained in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, a collection of contemporary North American comic art edited by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti. Robert Crumb’s fetishes, Art Spiegelman’s neuroses, and Chris Ware’s youthful insecurities are all on display in the book, and those themes in many ways directly oppose Disney’s polite, well-scrubbed, heavily controlled postwar works. Sure, Mickey Mouse could be a pervy prankster in his early days; in Steamboat Willie, he uses a winch to lift Minnie up by her undies, swings a screaming cat by its tail, and turns a duck into an ad hoc hurdy-gurdy. But his creator would probably have little patience for Tony Millionaire’s foul-mouthed strip, “Maakies,” or the hooker and street bum in the samples from Archer Prewitt’s “Sof’ Boy,” both of which are featured in Brunetti’s book.

That said, the editor makes it clear, through his selections, that both Chris Ware and Disney have shared roots in straightforward gag writing. The opening pages of the collection are dedicated to three- or four-panel strips, some of which are the offbeat likes of “Underworld” and “Zippy the Pinhead.” But Brunetti also dedicates space to works inspired by Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts.” For most people, the star of “Peanuts” is Snoopy, but for cartoonists, Charlie Brown is the dominating figure—a roly-poly underdog whose intelligence, awkwardness, and self-loathing make him sort of the ur-character for many of the graphic novels published in recent years. (Reading Brunetti’s book, it’s hard not to assume that a lot of its cartoonists suffered from a Charlie Brown-like despair during their childhoods; Chris Ware, for one, cops to that in his tribute.)

The anthology also includes an essay by Schulz in which he details the amount of rigor required to break into the cartooning business. “You must be in constant search for the characters and ideas that will eventually lead you to your best areas of work,” he writes. Like Disney, who launched drawing classes at the studio to get his animators up to his standards during the making of Snow White, Schulz was fighting against a presumption that cartooning was a naïve, anyone-can-do-it art form, or a repository of kiddie lit. Folks aghast at the notion of a 9/11 comic might make something not just of Maus (which is excerpted in the anthology) but also of Jaime Hernandez’s intimate and mystical redemption tale, “Flies on the Ceiling”; David Collier’s intricate, well-researched “The Ethel Catherwood Story”; or John Hankiewicz’s reminiscence, “A Paragraph by Saul Bellow (1915-2005).”

Ultimately, Brunetti’s book isn’t arguing for comics’ not-just-for-kids status so much as displaying the form’s many possibilities. (After all, only daily newspapers still play up the “Comics aren’t for kids anymore!” angle.) Cartooning, like any medium, is an empty vessel that’s free to be manipulated and used in any number of ways. Either animated or on paper, it easily lends itself to the gag. And if it fails to become more than that, the shortcoming isn’t with the medium but its makers—Uncle Walt, unfortunately, chief among them.

Two years ago Israeli author Etgar Keret published a children’s book about a man who saves his family by abandoning it. In Dad Runs Away With the Circus, the titular father is so seduced by a traveling group of lion-tamers, elephants, plate-spinners, and acrobats that (after a brief argument with Mom) he chooses to leave his son and daughter and perform under the big top for a while. He eventually returns home, but only after a whirlwind global tour. “Everything went back to being the same as it always had been,” Keret writes—except for Dad being able to use his newfound fire-breathing skills to cook hotdogs at barbecues.

The book is as playful as any piece of kiddie lit you might find, but it’s still a surprise: Using a mid-life crisis, or any family dysfunction, for comic relief doesn’t get a lot of traction in American letters these days. Blame the memoir glut, blame sobersided MFA programs, blame Oprah—for whatever reason, a lot of popular American writing about families takes its main theme as fixing the flaws that plague us. Into this arid arena arrives Keret, a very funny and very odd writer who aggressively turns the family-problem story inside out. Our screwups with our parents, kids, and lovers are the things we ought to revel in, he argues—they’re what save us, make us whole. That’s not necessarily a novel theme, and for a while there was a small tribe of writers making hay of all the nervous handwringing by letting their freak flag fly: Joseph Heller for example, or Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, even early John Irving. These days, however, it’s an idea we only get slathered in gloom from Rick Moody, soaked in irony from Dave Eggers, and not at all from melodrama pimps like Nicholas Sparks. All of those three can give you love and death, but none of them would set a comic love story in Uzbekistan, which happens to be where the gates of hell are.

Keret was born in 1967, the son of two Polish-born holocaust survivors; he grew up in Israel and, by his account, had a dismal time during his mandatory military service, made worse by the suicide of one of his army buddies. This is the formula that might have produced a drearily glum fiction voice for latter-day disaffected Israelis, but Keret’s refused the role. Instead his off-kilter short-stories, written in Hebrew, have earned him an Eggers- and Moody-like celebrity among young readers in Israel. He’s sold more than two hundred thousand copies of his collections and earned the title of most-shoplifted author in the country—an Israeli Bukowski.

The Nimrod Flipout, his second collection of stories published in the U.S., offers thirty glimpses into beautifully bizarre circumstances and predicaments. In “Fatso,” the narrator’s girlfriend lets him in on a secret: “What if I told you that at night I turn into a heavy, hairy man, with no neck, with a gold ring on his pinky, would you still love me?” No joke, she really does become a burly bully at night, but the hero finds that there’s a best-of-both-worlds aspect to this transformation; sex with the woman’s pretty good, and the guy knows good steak joints. A young boy in “Pride and Joy” suffers from a “rare family disease” in which the parents become shorter as the child grows taller; to keep Mom and Dad from disappearing entirely he tries to stunt his growth. His smoking, along with his erratic sleeping and eating patterns, alienates him from his peers—nobody said balancing the trials of adolescence with family illness was going to be easy. But when the boy finally gets to kiss a girl, his father’s right there cheering like a soccer dad, sitting in his son’s shirt pocket.

Those stories, like nearly everything Keret writes, are commercial-break short. Few of the pieces in The Nimrod Flipout or its 2001 predecessor, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, run longer than ten pages; the closest he’s come to a novel is “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” a forty-page story written as a series of vignettes in the latter book, set in a seriocomic afterworld for people who’ve killed themselves. (It’s been adapted into a film, Wristcutters: A Love Story, which features a cameo by Tom Waits, a very Keretian musician.) That brevity helps give many of Keret’s stories the intensity and impact of fables, but without the pat moralizing. “Dirt,” all of two pages long, twins the narrator’s fantasy about opening a chain of laundromats for singles (“wherever there are lonely people and dirty laundry, they’ll always come to me”) with a sort of prayer for his father, who is sick with guilt over the narrator’s suicide. In “For Only 9.99 (Incl. Tax and Postage),” a boy writes in for a pamphlet alleging to contain the meaning of life—which turns out to be the real deal, though the boy discovers this knowledge doesn’t do anything about your fear of death, or angry religious mobs, or dads who think you’re being bilked. In the end the publisher releases a new pamphlet solving a more mundane problem, on sale for 29.99, and the story closes with a vaudevillian kicker: “One lucky break, and already they go and up the price.”

You’ll notice a few recurring themes here: boys navigating adolescence, parents with commanding and often domineering roles, suicide and its aftershocks. And you might also notice a distinct lack of what you might call Israeli-ness. Keret’s stories are often set in Tel Aviv and sometimes reference Middle Eastern politics in passing, but the author seems to be striving for universality in his stories. “When you wake up in the morning,” he told Newsweek, “before you’ve had your first cup of coffee, what you think about is not, Why isn’t there a Palestinian state? You say, ‘Why doesn’t my girlfriend love me?’ Or ‘I hope somebody didn’t steal my car.’” Keret’s taken a few whacks in his homeland for such attitudes, and he hasn’t had an easier go of it in the U.S.: Reviewing The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God in the New York Times Book Review, novelist Benjamin Anastas dunned Keret for choosing to “provoke without consequence, entertain without investment, and value above all things the pursuit of fleeting pleasures.”

It wouldn’t be the first time a critic’s mistaken comedy and brevity for shallowness. But if Anastas means that Keret often fails to tell the story straight, he’s guilty as charged. Unquestionably, he can be glib and hollow on occasion: The three pages of “My Girlfriend’s Naked” don’t contain much more insight than the three words of its title, and “Malffunction” is an unfunny one-page gag about a balky keyboard. And he’s not much for stylized characterization; there usually isn’t the room.

But that’s not to say his stories are mechanical, emotionless morality tales—and Keret never once confuses the humor he finds in his characters’ predicaments with an opportunity for a cheap shot. The most carefully designed piece in The Nimrod Flipout is the title story, in which three young men are haunted by the ghost of Nimrod, an army buddy who killed himself. His intervention in the lives of the three men slowly frays the braid of their friendship, and the power of the story resides in how Keret locates the point at which mourning a lost friend stops being commemorative and starts to mean you’re living in the past.

The outsized and fable-like qualities of Keret’s stories make them great fodder for graphic novels; as proof, Jetlag collects five drawn by members of the Tel Aviv comic collective Actus. (It was first published in Israel in 1998, finally making its way to the U.S. in February.) The artists seem to key in on Keret at his weirdest, picking one tale about a plane that’s intentionally going to crash in the ocean (“so people will take the whole flight safety issue more seriously”), and another in which the occupants of hell get a twenty-four-hour furlough in Uzbekistan once a century. But “Margolis,” a loyal take on the Bus Driver story “Breaking the Pig,” is both the best-turned tale and least absurd—a clean, simple, and funny inversion of typical morality tales about fathers and sons. A man gives his son a piggy bank in order to teach him the value of money, but as the pig gets stuffed with coins and cash, the boy begins to cherish it more; he’s completely forgotten the desire for a skateboard that prompted the pig’s arrival in the first place.

That’s almost banal on its face, but “Margolis,” like many Keret family tales, is thick with thorns. The boy’s affection for the piggy bank reflects his growing distance from his already-remote father, who creates an austere chill in the household. The boy tells Margolis, named “after somebody who used to live in our mailbox and dad couldn’t scratch his name off the sticker,” that he loves him more than his mother and father. But that statement comes off as neither cute nor tragic, nor even bittersweet. It charmingly reflects how Margolis is the first thing the boy’s been able to love, and it maps the gulf between the boy and his father with a Carver-like elegance and a surrealistic tinge.

All of these assets have made Keret something of a celebrity in American alt-culture spheres, though maybe the reason his stories get read on This American Life have as much to do with their potency as their brevity. An Etgar Keret novel could easily be a complete disaster—endless cuteness and piled-on absurdities from a writer who isn’t at his best when he has to control a narrative throughline. But I wonder if folks didn’t say the same thing about Roth circa Goodbye, Columbus. The liberating power of dysfunction has been a tough sell in these parts for a while, and it may very well take a bright foreigner like Keret to make the case. An Israeli writing the next Great American Novel would be a beautiful, very Keretian thing.

“When you truly love somebody, all those things that at the beginning are really alienating are things you learn to love,” Keret once told an interviewer, by way of explaining “Fatso.” But that statement serves as a sort of motto for about everything he’s written. For the past decade of Prozac Nation-ed memoirs and Corrections-obsessed novels, the prevailing sensibility in popular American writing has been, well, sensible, focused on the path to healing, and looking at broken homes as ships to be righted. Keret’s simple assertion—that we can no more safely remove our flaws than we can remove, say, an artery—is a useful prescription. Let the healing begin.

About ten years ago, intrigued by the rerelease of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and amused by Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I decided to explore the rest of Russ Meyer’s oeuvre. I figured that such a project was best tackled with the same voluptuous spirit in which Meyer made his movies, so I walked up to the counter of my neighborhood video store in San Francisco with a handful of films I found in the cult bin: Cherry, Harry, and Racquel!, The Seven Minutes, and Lorna. The Seven Minutes is a mediocre, thrill-free thriller that Meyer coughed up for Twentieth Century Fox in 1971, so the clerk rented it to me for free. The videotape they had was a crummy transfer, he explained—and besides, it wasn’t really a Russ Meyer film.

In other words, it wasn’t a film about tits. Nevertheless, after Meyer died last fall (at eighty-two, of complications from pneumonia after a long, sad decline into dementia), many obituaries strained to position him as more than a soft-core icon. Time argued that he “set the tone for late twentieth century pop culture at its most cheerfully leering.” Chuck Stephens, in Film Comment, compared Meyer to Sam Fuller and hailed him as “an American independent before anyone had thought of the term.” These assessments followed years of claims by many cineasts—not least Meyer’s early booster and occasional collaborator, Roger Ebert—that colorful, bosomy, and often baffling films like Up! and Supervixens were, in fact, essays on female empowerment.

But in a new biography, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film, author Jimmy McDonough points out that the director himself wasn’t much for this kind of sophisticated thinking. “I don’t care to comment about what might be inside a lady’s head,” Meyer once said. “Hopefully, it’s my dick.”

Sam Fuller, like hell. Meyer was exuberantly sui generis, but his impact on popular culture is modest at best. Even McDonough, who’s clearly a fan, has a hard time arguing that Meyer belongs anywhere but the cult bin. In the fifties, before moving into film, Meyer became known as a talented cheesecake photographer (a genre he referred to as “tittyboom”) and shot several Playboy centerfolds in the magazine’s early years. His first successful film, 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas, took its cue from Hef and helped propel soft-core porn out of grindhouse theaters and stag parties. With two exceptions—Pussycat and Dolls—the remainder of Meyer’s career amounts to nothing more than a persistent big-breast obsession, which became more dreary and perverse as time went on. Meyer spent his later years laboring over A Clean Breast, his massive memoir and photo collection, driving staffers mad with endless fussing over photo selection and even type kerning. He initially planned to title the book The Rural Fellini, until Ebert wisely suggested a change. To the extent that Meyer worked hard to find archetypal man-killers—“Meyer women” like Uschi Digard and Haji, who often appeared jiggling in the desert—he’s an auteur. But a man who learned the basics of movie-making by filming Patton’s march through France during World War II never produced anything that remotely resembled an Amarcord.
To its credit, Big Bosoms doesn’t over-sell Meyer’s accomplishments; McDonough presents his subject mainly as a snickering, grudge-bearing, I-got-mine tough guy who eagerly snookered the movie business. Teas, an hour-long bit of motion-picture “tittyboom” that looks almost comically tame today, made a million dollars when it came out—more than forty times its production cost. Indeed, throughout his bio, McDonough practically implores readers to think of Meyer as a moneymaker first and filmmaker second (the book’s section breaks are dollar signs).

Luckily for McDonough, there’s a quirky, intriguing, and sometimes baffling persona beneath the profiteering lech. “[Meyer films] without dames means TV-movie tedium,” he concedes, so Big Bosom’s most intriguing passages have little to do with the movies themselves. Instead, they’re the ones discussing Meyer’s tendency to “inspire” his actresses by either browbeating or sleeping with them; the extended obscenity battle over his 1968 film Vixen! (Charles Keating, later a notorious player in the 1980s savings and loan scandal, successfully prosecuted the case); and the ignominious meltdown that occurred around Who Killed Bambi? (aka The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle), the Sex Pistols film that Meyer was initially tapped to direct. Meyer and Pistols front man Johnny Rotten took an almost immediate dislike to each other—Rotten later called Meyer a “dirty old man” and “an overbearing, senile old git”—and Fox pulled out of the production after Grace Kelly, a stockholder, protested the choice of Meyer as director.

However, McDonough does champion Meyer artistically, as it were, by defending the likes of Mondo Topless and Common-Law Cabin, and here he’s on shakier ground. “When aliens excavate the ruins of planet Earth in 2525, would you rather they found a copy of some anemic, technically inept, politically-correct-to-the-point-of-boredom John Sayles film?” he writes. “They’d learn a lot more about us watching a top-heavy Lorna Maitland pulling a burro up a hill!” As if that scene from Mondo Topless shows anything more than Maitland’s remarkably cantilevered figure—and as if what the coal-mining-town tragedy depicted in Matewan really needed was more cleavage.

So why did Meyer eventually get the Sayles-like auteur treatment? And why are Meyer’s films still worth a glimpse? The answer is reflected in a comment from longtime Meyer booster John Waters: “He made industrials about tits.” Meyer’s plots are ridiculous, but the opening sequences of many of his films are skillfully constructed and sometimes utterly sublime. No matter what nonsense the ponderous voiceovers were spewing, his shots of breasts, cityscapes, cars, bars, whatever, all packed together, were brilliant, impressionistic visions of the sixties and seventies zeitgeist. It’s as if Meyer learned editing by speed-reading Eisenstein and a stack of Playboys, and McDonough captures the aesthetic perfectly: “Ass shaking! Cut! Chrome fender! Cut! Breasts quivering! Cut! Car radio! Cut! Tape recorder! Cut!”

After those sequences, though, Meyer’s films tend to run out of gas—your ability to enjoy them is mainly a function of your ability to appreciate the figures of Digard, Erica Gavin, or Kitten Natividad. It may be that what critics called “female empowerment” in Meyer’s films was really just their female stars’ unique capacity to render men immobile, both agape and agog. These women are not empowered, just overpowering. Pussycat stands out from the dross because it was with that film that Meyer developed his editing style; it also had a remarkably full-blooded and indomitable character in Tura Satana’s Varla. Brash, no-nonsense, and threatening, she’s the very definition of a man-killer: “She’s a murderous, evil villain, all right,” McDonough writes, “but you want to get into her pants.” (Interestingly, Meyer, despite some effort, couldn’t.)

What distinguished Dolls was a budget from Twentieth Century Fox, some semblance of plot, and Meyer’s ability to integrate his jump-cutting throughout the film. His editing underscored the comedy of this tale of the rise and fall of a stoner-girl rock band. The sex scene in a Bentley is more about the Bentley than the sex; and shortly after the youthful Edy Williams coos to a stud, “I’d like to strap you on sometime,” we cut to an elderly woman in ghastly makeup saying the same thing. Dolls may be the only time Meyer seemed willing to acknowledge the inherent ridiculousness in his career-long enterprise.

Because he seemed to be so willfully benighted about his obsession, it’s hard to make a case for Meyer as an enduring artist. Sexuality is an auteurist theme; tits aren’t. Discussing his 1963 film Lorna, he bristles at any suggestion of influence or aesthetics: “Did I shoot in black and white for the purpose of grittiness and to emulate the Italian masters? Horseshit! I didn’t have the money to do it in color.” If Meyer had something to say about sexuality, it’s hard to figure out what it might be. Lorna exploits a no-means-yes theme, Vixen advocates incest in a sidewise manner, and the opening of Up! is a button-pushing mess of S&M and Nazi themes. For Meyer, there was no continuity problem or philosophical bind that a shot of quivering cleavage couldn’t fix.

A defining style, it turns out, is not the same thing as enduring influence. It’s telling that Meyer’s clearest legacy isn’t in movies but in rock music: Poison Ivy, guitarist for the psychobilly band the Cramps, cribbed much of her brassy persona from Varla, and at least two bands take their name from Meyer films: the influential grunge act Mudhoney and the mediocre hair-metal group Faster Pussycat. And film? Well, nobody makes industrials about tits anymore. The classier “erotic” mainstream movies from the past few years—Swimming Pool, Y tu mama tambien, Romance, etc.—take their inspiration from randy stylists like soft-core pioneer Radley Metzger or gauzy erotica like Last Tango in Paris. And the rest? Well, earlier this year, actor-turned-director Elizabeth Starr resurrected the career of Kitten Natividad for a remake of Pussycat that was billed as “a titanic tribute to the late great Russ Meyer.” It’s a straight-to-video hardcore porno, costarring Ron Jeremy, titled Faster Pussycat F—well, you get the idea.