Jon Robin Labby 1951 - 2001

"The better the actor the more stupid he is.”
-- Truman Capote

COINCIDENCE

I’m reading about Errol Morris and thinking about Robin Labby. If life seems like one big déjà vu, perhaps it’s because there’s a method to Godz coincidence. A tsunami kills 180,000, a cyclone in Myanmar kills 100,000, and almost 3000 died on 9/11. What is she trying to tell us? Maybe she’s not trying to tell us anything, Randy, maybe she’s asking a question, like what the hell are you talking about?

“Coincidence,” that’s what. As in it’s probably just a coincidence that I watched “7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958) on TCM last night. Like Labby, Morris loved the stop-motion photography of Willis O’Brien ("King Kong" (1931)) and his protégé, Ray Harryhausen, who supervised the F/X in “Sinbad.” Another of Morris’ favorites was “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954).

After quitting school in 1975, Morris traveled to Plainfield, Wisconsin, where he interviewed the patron saint of serial killers, Ed Gein. Like Labby, he was preoccupied with the morbid and bizarre. He had a theory that Gein had dug up his mother’s body and the grave would be empty (For more on this, google Morris and Herzog conversation). Although I never talked to Labby about Errol Morris, if he knew of Morris’ work, he would have loved it.

In 1976, Morris saw a headline in the “San Francisco Chronicle,” ‘450 Dead Pets Going to Napa Valley,’ which prompted his first feature film, “Gates of Heaven” (1978). What follows relies heavily on Michael Corvino’s 1980 review of “Gates” in “Film Quarterly."

One of the women interviewed in Morris’ film comments, “There’s your dog; your dog’s dead. But where’s the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn’t it?” This philosophical question is the unspoken theme at the heart of “Gates of Heaven.”

Corvino writes, “It’s very funny at first. But a measure of the film’s penetrative power is that every laugh boomerangs; after a while it’s no longer funny. Morris as a naïf who has made an impolite movie: he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s an unspoken rule that one’s not supposed to show real people, ordinary people. Looking so sad, so silly, so depressing.” Ostensibly, this is a film about pet cemeteries, but it’s really about the terrifying nature of everyday life. And it achieves this surreal quality by consistently refusing to romanticize, or better, humanize, these real-life miscreants in their most boring and miserable moments. As Corvino notes, “People speak English, but it is in an English so imprecise, so inexpressive, so ‘mangled’ as to have lost all meaning.”

In making a documentary that refuses to obey the conventions of the genre, Morris’ film gains an originality that at once fascinates and puzzles. The staging of the interviews: the bronzed shoes, the photographic inserts, the carefully framed furnishings, the clothes (they look like costumes) all serve to upset the viewer's horizon of expectations. As Corvino puts it, "It’s as though Norman Rockwell, whistling on his way to work, has bicycled with his easel and his palette into ‘The Twilight Zone.'” The perfection of the setting counters the fractured and often incoherent content of the interviewee’s monologues. Rather than being a flaw, a consciously applied artificiality is what gives this film its aesthetic force. The climax of the film comes with the appearance of a woman named Florence. She appears in an orange-pink dress so garish as to distract from her sad life story. In a painfully bleak and methodical way she tells a story familiar to all of us. And, in Corvino’s words, “the viewer suddenly finds himself in the presence of a pain, a sorrow, so naked and so powerful that all the film’s artifice drops away, and the horror is out in the open, a horror which, up until this point, has been delicately held in balance by the acrid humor of the film.” “Gates of Heaven” is as disturbing as it is brilliant, and well worth watching for the serious student of documentary film.

Rob Labby’s films, while never having the funding Morris had access to, share Morris’ resistance to cinematic conventions. In “Obesity” the camera work is static. Rather than going for a simulated realism, Labby simply lets the camera tell the story, and similar to Herzog’s style of letting seemingly un-scripted footage foreshadow future events (see “Grizzly Man”(2005)), the cake-eating glutton in “Obesity” (Tony Tollefson) anticipates the ‘Antoinettish’ “let them eat cake” policy decisions made during the real-life Tollefson’s tenure as the Mayor of Marquette.

In Labby’s “Neap”(1973), an ordinary Joe, Steve Pomeroy, plays the role of a grease-ball who gets his comeuppance at the hands of two aliens (Mike Maki and Sudzy Glantz [hail the Skidoos]). The ironic tension of this Yooper morality tale is created by juxtaposing bizarrely humorous settings and costumes (cornball, low budget masks) with the poetic-justice-story of a bad guy who must pay for his cruelties.

Rest Easy Robin – R.T.