TALES OF LOHR: "COBWEB"
Thoughts on Samuel Bodin's directorial debut; plus, in "Factory Roll Call": Yoko? Oh yes!
Last week, a friend of mine informed me that she has been certified as a mandatory reporter for her five-year-old daughter’s school. To those unfamiliar, this means she has been trained to identify, and is obligated to report to school and legal officials, any signs of neglect or abuse she detects afflicting her daughter’s schoolmates. While I am not wholly aware of all the particulars of just what these red flags might be, I have to assume that her warning alarms would start blaring at top volume if she were to encounter Peter, the woefully beset youngster at the center of Cobweb, an old-dark-house horror film that marks the feature directorial debut of TV stalwart Samuel Bodin.
Ably portrayed by Woody Norman, who made a memorable impression opposite Joaquin Phoenix in C’mon C’mon, Peter’s sorrows have come not single spies, but in battalions. He is a daily target of bullies at school, the source of the bruises and scrapes that appear regularly on his chin. His home life provides no sanctuary, as his parents Carol (Lizzy Caplan) and Mark (Antony Starr) alternate oppressive levels of concern with disciplinary measures that creep into the draconian. The house itself provokes anxiety, with its worn-down clapboard façade and drafty darkness. Even the impending arrival of Halloween can’t lift Peter’s spirits, as he has been forbidden from trick-or-treating ever since a neighbor girl went missing a few All Hallow’s Eves ago.
And then, there are the strange tapping sounds that emanate from behind the walls of Peter’s bedroom every night. Carol and Mark eagerly (perhaps too eagerly) dismiss this as a young boy’s overactive imagination. But soon, the noises are accompanied by a whispering voice, desperately sharing with Peter dark, horrifying secrets. About his parents. About the old grandfather clock in their bedroom. And about that pit beneath the chained-up grating in the basement floor. Soon, Peter’s substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) begins to suspect that something is not right at her student’s home. But Carol and Mark prove willing to go to extremes to keep their skeletons closeted. Little do they know that Peter is just as ready to risk everything to find out the truth.
Over the course of its carefully paced 88 minutes, Cobweb, written by Chris Thomas Devlin, keeps the viewer guessing precisely what subgenre of horror it is that they’re dealing with. Its early scenes suggest this may be an entry in the well-traveled Creepy Child school, yet another look at a youth intertwined with malevolent supernatural forces. Then, the increasingly tense midsection of the film moves us closer to the realm of psychological domestic terror, the biggest potential threat not from the voices in the walls, but from Peter’s parents themselves. Starr’s piercing stare and ready-at-hand hammer, Caplan’s visibly constrained anxiety and passive-aggressive Good Mother gestures, create a visceral tightening-thumbscrews vibe, culminating in a startling sequence of Caplan envisioned as a slavering demon. Then, in the third act, Devlin and Bodin reveal their cards, and the film, which has thus far largely favored atmosphere over shocks (with strong support from Philip Lozano’s moody cinematography and Alan Gilmore’s effectively antiquated production design), transforms into a flat-out creepfest, with snarling sound effects, splattering viscera, and at least one guy-staggering-into-the-hall-without-a-head scene.
Cobweb’s second act is its most potent, galvanized by Peter’s mounting uneasiness with his parents and the accompanying intensification of their efforts to keep him (sometimes literally) in the dark about their intentions and actions. Throughout this section of the film, Devlin crafts his dialogue and Bodin stages the characters’ interactions to create an ever-present sense of impending danger, while cannily keeping Carol and Mark seeming just reasonable enough that this all might really be Peter losing his own grip on reality. It is to Bodin and Devlin’s credit that, while Cobweb draws narrative material from traumas and challenges facing real-world child abuse victims, the film largely manages to avoid falling into mere ugly exploitation of those issues. To its detriment, it is not nearly as impactful in its portrayal of bullying, the schoolyard thugs being present mostly to provide the climactic carnage with some convenient cannon fodder. And like far too many horror films, Cobweb loses a bit of its juice once its central fiend seizes the spotlight, the visual effects not quite convincing enough to put the terror across with maximum force.
Thankfully, Cobweb’s cast picks up some of this narrative and technical slack. Coleman brings a warmth and generosity to her encounters with Peter, and Starr makes strong use of the same diamond-hard alpha-male avuncularity that has served him well as Homelander on the Amazon Prime streaming series The Boys. Norman’s natural hangdog affect and tremulous vocal delivery render him extremely easy to root for. And Caplan, such a vibrant, up-to-the-minute presence in many of her earlier roles, is formidable indeed as a woman so constricted by forced sister-wife propriety, suppressed rage, fear, and self-hatred that even the act of baking some smiley-face cupcakes for her son’s birthday is warped into a cry for help.
Cobweb is neither a breakthrough in horror storytelling nor the emergence of an indisputable new master of the idiom. But genre fans should find enough in the filmmaking and performances to make this worth a watch. Anyone easily triggered by images of kids in peril, however, should be well warned. Peter’s situation with his parents is indeed a trial no child should be forced to endure.
And, as it turns out, the rest of his family is even worse.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
YOKO ONO (1933 - )
When one considers the most misunderstood, misrepresented, and unfairly maligned figures in pop cultural history, Yoko Ono resides virtually on a tier all her own. To a vast majority, she is at best a glorified groupie, at worst the woman who single-handedly broke up the greatest band in music history. This pervasive perception, fueled as it is by more than a little misogyny and racism, also does a considerable disservice to a creative career with few contemporary peers in its breadth, diversity, and thematic-aesthetic consistency. Sorry, folks: Like it or not, Yoko Ono is nothing less than a titan of modern art.
A native of Tokyo, Japan, Ono’s parents were conversant in various styles of Western classical and traditional Japanese music. She resided in the city through World War II, when her family hid in a bunker during the firebombings of March 1945. These attacks left Ono and her relatives forced to wander the decimated streets with their belongings in a wheelbarrow, begging for food. It is this period of desperation and deprivation that led Ono to assume what she describes as her lifelong status as an “outsider.”
Ono moved to New York City, where her family was already in residence, in 1952, enrolling in Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry, literature, and the avant-garde classical music of John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Edgard Varèse. She left the school in 1956 to elope with Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, through whom she eventually met Cage. During this period, she began developing her distinctively austere, alternately delicate and confrontational brand of conceptual / performance art, which brought her to the attention of the like-minded artists of the downtown New York collective known as Fluxus. Among Fluxus’ members and associates were Korean-born video artist Nam June Paik, Theatre of Eternal Music founder La Monte Young, and multimedia practitioner George Maciunas, who gave Ono her first solo gallery exhibition, at his AG Gallery in 1961. Though Ono never formally joined Fluxus, preferring to remain an independent artist, she collaborated on numerous projects with members of the group, including performing in loft concerts with Young and serving as the subject of the Maciunas-produced avant-garde short film Disappearing Music for Face (1966), directed by Mieko Shiomi.
Ono’s most memorable works of this period include her notorious Cut Piece (1965), debuted at Carnegie Hall, in which a mute, prone Ono invited audience members to slowly snip away her clothing with scissors; Painting to Be Stepped On (1960-61), a laid-flat blank canvas to be “painted” with footprints from spectators; and The Fog Machine (1967), where a haze-shrouded Ono was covered with gauze by volunteering viewers. Ono’s work was noteworthy for its intense engagement with spectatorial participation; its struggles with the notion of feminine agency and victimization; and its sense of communal harmony as essential to the human project. These and other pieces solidified her reputation as a force to be reckoned with in the international art scene, and brought her into relationships with many of the other major art figures of the day, including Andy Warhol.
Ono was twice divorced by the time she met the man who would become her most famous creative and life partner. John Lennon first encountered her in 1966, when she was preparing an exhibition at London’s Indica Gallery, and the two found each other increasingly drawn together, despite the fact that he was already married to his own first spouse Cynthia. Lennon would write songs inspired by Ono (most notably the jaunty “The Ballad of John and Yoko”), and began collaborating on avant-garde original compositions with her. They consummated their relationship in 1968, the Beatle divorcing Cynthia that same year. Ono and Lennon married in Gibraltar in February 1969, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam, where they conducted the legendary Bed-In For Peace in protest of the escalating tensions in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Ono’s regular presence in the Beatles’ recording studios, including her occasional appearances on the band’s vocal tracks, contributed to the already festering tensions within the group, and though she has been unfairly tarred for decades as the sole factor that led the Beatles to separate, she was at least one element of the welter of concerns and conflicts that finally caused the band to pull apart. Lennon and Ono swiftly formed their own ensemble, branded the Plastic Ono Band, and began regularly collaborating on new musical works together, including the perennial holiday favorite “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” in which the two of them whisper holiday wishes to John and Cynthia’s son Julian, and to Kyoko, Ono’s daughter by her second husband.
Despite a sometimes tumultuous relationship that saw Lennon briefly conducting an affair with the couple’s assistant May Pang, not to mention each of them having their struggles with drugs and the law, Ono and Lennon remained partners in life and creativity throughout the 1970s. They had their own son, Sean Ono Lennon, and continued to create original works of music and art in close creative and emotional symbiosis. The two would settle in New York City, where they resided at the upscale Dakota Apartments on Central Park West. This period also saw the peak of their mutual friendship with Andy Warhol. The trio spent much leisure time together, and Warhol captured many Polaroids of the famous pair, both candid shots and more formally composed portraits. At one point, Warhol and the Ono Lennons even contemplated purchasing several buildings together, a deal that the couple eventually bowed out of, leading (as the pages of Warhol’s Diaries attest) to some rancor on the Pop artist’s part. But Ono and Warhol remained on close terms, so much so that, in 1987, she was invited to speak at Warhol’s memorial service at Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
But before that, Ono had her own untimely death burden to face. In December 1980, shortly after the recording sessions were completed for the Lennon / Ono album Double Fantasy, Lennon was fatally shot outside the Dakota by a mentally ill obsessed fan. The tragically widowed Ono, who was at his side at the moment of his murder, weathered her grief and soon, inevitably, channeled it into the creative, with 1981’s album Season of Glass, the cover of which bore a photo of Lennon’s bloodstained spectacles. Further memorials to Lennon’s memory include the Ono-funded Strawberry Fields memorial, which has stood in Central Park across from the Dakota since 1985, and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan, which from 2000 until its closing in 2010 showcased Lennon artifacts and memorabilia from Ono’s own personal collection.
And still, Ono just kept on creating. Works from recent decades include New York Rock, a 1994 Broadway musical featuring her original songs; the 2015 kinetic sculpture Arising, a feminist statement in which silicon female bodies were set ablaze in a Venetian lagoon; and her Wish Trees (1996-present), a worldwide series of installations in which visitors are invited to affix paper tags inscribed with wishes to trees native to the installation region. (One of these trees has resided for several years in the outdoor plaza adjoining the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.) She has released nine albums under her own name since Lennon’s death, along with five LPs featuring remixes of her material, and retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, London’s Serpentine Galleries, and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany. Her accolades include a Grammy, an Emmy, an ASCAP Award, a lifetime achievement award from the Venice Biennale, and honorary doctorates from Bard College and from Liverpool University in her late husband’s hometown. And she has never wavered in her activist commitments to human rights and peace, speaking out and creating works in the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School; against fracking in the eastern United States; and in protests against acts of war in all corners of the globe. Celebrating her 90th birthday this past February, Ono is still at work, proclaiming that, to her, art “is like breathing…If I don’t do it, I start to choke.”
Not bad, wouldn’t you agree, for someone who never did anything but break up a band?
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