If it weren’t for their characteristic shadow-infatuated cinematography, you might not recognize the first two clips as coming from the same movie, Jacques Tourneur’s “Curse of the Demon.” The first episode represents the classic postwar Monster Movie of the kind the Japanese perfected. Except Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan were products of the rogue technology of the atomic age, while the fire demon below is a lot older—as old as Hell, actually--and summoned with runes written on parchment.

Jacques Tourneur, “Curse of the Demon” (1957)

But in both cases, the monster is the point of the movie. Everything prior to its appearance is just a buildup to that appearance, a lengthy buildup being necessary to distract viewers from the shoddiness of the actual spectacle. If not for the creepy bat-like chittering that heralds its arrival and the way it unfurls from a ball of glowing smoke like a Sea Monkey dropped into a glass of water, the fire demon might be a stuffed animal. A big stuffed animal with a mobile tongue and an upper lip that curls like Elvis’s.

The demon appears only twice in the movie, once early on and then at its climax. More than an hour passes between those moments. This isn’t a lot of monster. If I’d seen “Curse” when I was eight, I would have been bored shitless.

And, shamefully, I would probably have been even more bored if the great Tourneur had retained control of his picture. That fire demon wasn’t his idea. The asshole producer insisted on sticking it in.

In his earlier films “Cat People” (1942), “I Walked With a Zombie,” and “The Leopard Man” (1943), Tourneur—then working with producer Val Lewton—developed a style that was pure suggestion, all lurking shadow and disembodied sound. You never knew if Simone Simon really turned into a giant, man-eating cat or was just ‘neurotic.’

Tourneur originally made “Curse of the Demon” with the same suave ambiguity. There are plenty of indications that the film’s gloating, goateed villain traffics with real devils. But at other times he seems to be exactly the charlatan Dana Andrews’ ill-mannered scientist accuses him of being, a tournament-level mind-gamer who scares the marks to death with threats and scraps of paper.

The tension between real and pretend menace is most excruciating during the séance scene. Does evil reside in the darkness outside the house or in the (relative) light inside it? How seriously should you take a fubsy medium who frets that “the spirits sometimes resent previous knowledge”?

And how can you keep a straight face when those spirits are called up by ladies singing “Cherry Ripe” at the top of their lungs? Check out the guilelessness of the singers’ mouths, which open as wide as Muppets’.

Jacques Tourneur, “Curse of the Demon” (1957)

If the medium’s cry, “It’s in the trees. . . . It’s coming!” sounds familiar, it’s because Kate Bush sampled it for her 1985 hit “Hounds of Love.” And in the video below, Robb McCaffree and Bryan Harrison mix, shred, and puree snippets of Tourneur’s film, Bush’s song and her original music video into a fantasmagoria of dread and longing that’s an object lesson in the power of what remains unseen, either because it’s not there or because you don’t dare turn around to look at it.

You’re too busy running.

- Peter Trachtenberg

Nicholas Ray, “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955)

The United States is an adolescent nation. I remember feeling offended when I first read this, probably back in the 1960s in one of my parents’ news magazines, LIFE or Time or Newsweek.

But of course we’re adolescent. We’re less than 250 years old. At 250, England didn’t even speak English yet.

And, really, what’s wrong with being adolescent? Adolescents are cool. Adolescents are vital and sexy. They can run the 100-yard in 11.5 and have an orgasm in 20 seconds and be ready to have another one 20 seconds later. They look great in Abercrombie.

They look great in mall Goth gear, even if they’re a little fat.

But adolescents are adolescent. They’re immature. They won’t do their homework. They can’t postpone gratification. They need a national health plan, they want a defensive missile system. But the missile system doesn’t work, you tell them. Fuck that, you just got to mess with the carburetor.

The worst thing about adolescents is that they’re labile. Their moods zigzag. One minute they’re washing the Suburban without your even asking, the next they’ve totaled it and their blood level is .35. For all their belligerent claims of independence, they’re herd animals, their servility disguised by the way they keep jumping herds.

Under the Bush administration, the U.S. saw itself as Gary Cooper in “High Noon.” It identified with his embattled decency and courage, with the allegiance to principle that made him willing to risk not just his life but his marriage to a Quaker hottie thirty years his junior.

Fred Zinnemann, “High Noon” (1952)

In the movie trailer, Marshall Will Kane is identified as “a man too proud to run.” That was us. It was how George Bush sold us on invading Iraq. We were too proud to run, certainly not from Sadaam. (“Have you forgotten what he is? Have you forgotten what he’s done to people? Have you forgotten that he’s crazy?”) Let the French run.

But at key moments, the country slipped role models and became more like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause,” a tormented outcast, as sensitive as an eyeball, thrashing around him for a moment of true feeling. He can’t make friends except with other outcasts. Plato (Sal Mineo) and Judy (Natalie Wood) might be early versions of the Coalition of the Willing, with the twitchy, molten-eyed Mineo a stand-in for valiant little El Salvador. Hoods taunt him, and he has to stand up to them. In that respect, he’s still like Gary Cooper. “It was a matter of honor. I had to do something. They called me chicken. You know, chicken? I had to go.”

Jim Stark is saying this to his father. Their relationship might be a prevision of the one some thirty years later between Bushes Junior and Senior, the disheveled fuckup son and the grey-coiffed father, pompously suave in a dinner jacket and homburg, who collecting the kid from the drunk tank, chuckles, “Oh, I cut loose pretty good in my day, too.”

But the relationship also suggests the lurching tug-of-war between the United States and Old Europe during the lead-up to Iraq. One wants war, the other wants peace. One prizes realness, the other clings to convention. One is manly enough to go one-on-one in a knife fight, the other prisses around the house in his wife’s apron. In the scene in which a disgusted Jim Stark watches his father crawling on the floor to pick up a broken plate, then hoists him up by a frilled apron-strap, you see how the former president saw Jacques Chirac. Mission civilizatrice, my ass.

James Dean -- Inspirational Performance in Rebel Without a Cause from bombshell mashup on Vimeo.

The power of James Dean’s performance in “Rebel” lies in its mercurial shifts between loathing and longing, abandon and awareness. You can see them highlighted in this homage by the aptly-named Bombshell Mashup. Oddly, the sharpest pivot occurs during an exchange between Jim Stark and a surrogate father, the no-bullshit cop who has the balls to do what Jim’s real father can’t: rough him up.

(But even real men eventually run low on testosterone. Ed Platt, who played the cop, would later appear on TV as the Chief on “Get Smart,” where week after week he demonstrated the impotence of common sense against a really determined idiot.)

Alone with the cop, Jim pleads, “Please lock me up, I’m gonna hit somebody, I’m gonna do something!” He reaches blindly forward, his hand grazes the other man’s leg, then, in a sudden convulsion, he flails at the desk with his feet and fists. Maybe he’s recoiling from his own desire, which he only just then recognized, a boy’s eroticized longing for a man he could stand to become.

Or maybe he has a queasy intimation of what else he might become, once he gets tired of being an anguished suburban rebel. Jim Stark was basically a good kid. He just wanted a little direction from a father who didn’t get smashed at parties and wear an apron at home. But at the time I’m speaking of, the U.S. didn’t kill one kid in a game of chicken, and it didn’t turn itself into the cops. It killed some 100,000 Iraqis and 4,000 of its own young people and it left its wounded to languish amid rats and mold in a remote ward of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Its highest officials hinted in a hand-rubbing way about nuking Iran. A candidate for the presidency sang about it.

This isn’t Jim Stark. It’s Eric Harris, a teenager who also felt unloved—or, maybe worse, unrecognized. He used to post on the Web under the name “REB,” for Rebel.

You can find footage of the Columbine shootings on YouTube. I’d feel weird about using it, so I’ve made do with a montage from Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant.”

There is such a thing as reality, and some kinds of it shouldn’t be aestheticized.

Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has reinvented itself once more and is now an upright, civic-minded youngster who gets good grades, sits on the student council, and tutors the disadvantaged on weekends.

Grownups love him. They say, okay, the kid’s finally growing up. And maybe he has. Maybe this was who we were along. On the other hand, we may not have lost our fascination with Eric Harris. Kids like that are still there, fuming in the hall beside their lockers, grumbling about birth certificates and communists. Sometimes they have guns.

- Peter Trachtenberg

I found this while browsing YouTube for clips of the Stones playing songs from their great, underrated “Between the Buttons” album, the first Stones record I can remember getting high to.

The Rolling Stones, “Like a Rolling Stone” (July, 1965), from the album “Stripped“

So out of touch was I with the band’s recent history that I didn’t even realize they’d done a cover of the Dylan song that people unfamiliar with Muddy Waters think they were named for. It’s a good cover, though maybe not as good as the one Jimi Hendrix played at Monterey, the one that replaces the original’s piping circus organ with majestic thunderheads of guitar and its sneer with a pitying shake of the head. But this video, made by or for someone named Lulita B Jones, gets an extra layer of depth from its astonishing photos—which are by turns sexy, poignant, funny, and chilling—of Brian Jones.

I always thought Dylan wrote the song for Edie Sedgwick, but the video turns it into a song about Jones, a document of his slow, dazed fall off the chrome horse. You see him as he was in the band’s first years with his shining (and somewhat geeky) dome of blonde hair, looking like Mick’s delicate twin. He was supposed to be the pretty one, the Paul to Mick’s John and Keith’s George, an angel with the smirk of a devil or of a schoolboy pretending to be one.

Over the years the hair grows out and gets dirty, the narrow-lapeled suits give way to kurtas and shawls. He doesn’t just smirk at the camera, he scowls and picks his nose at it. (Someone ought to release a coffee table book of photos of beautiful stars making ugly faces.) His features coarsen, and in more and more of the stills he looks too stoned to play an instrument. He’s supposed to have spent most of the Beggar’s Banquet sessions parked in a corner, numbly shaking a tambourine or picking abstractedly at an autoharp or sitar whose plinks were left out of the mix. A while later he was kicked out of the band, and on July 3, 1969, he drowned in a swimming pool. He was 27.

By now the video mori is a familiar genre. The prototype is the memorial montage that’s shown at each year’s Oscars, two and a half minutes of iconic shots of Hollywood legends dissolving into less iconic shots of Hollywood asterisks, which I guess is a metaphor for what awaits most legends. In those years I actually watch the ceremonies, the tributes always make me tear up. But when I see one years after the fact, like the 2003 memorial below, I feel no more than mild bemusement:

Who knew that George Roy Hill, the director of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” died in the same year as Conrad Hall, its cinematographer? Who knew Billy Wilder was still alive in 2003? Shit, he must have been a hundred. And who was Sheb Wooley?

The problem is it’s hard to mourn a collectivity. A million and one dead people is a tragedy, Stalin said. But a million is a statistic. Most of the group tributes I’ve browsed on YouTube don’t do anything to me.

Not the ones to dead rappers. Not the ones to dead porn stars.

Not the round-ups of dead wrestlers.

R.I.P. “Big Boss Man” Swanson! God speed, Bryan “Crush” Adams!

To be affecting, a tribute video has to be devoted to a single subject. Even with the distracting shoe-gazing song that accompanies it, a memorial to Marlon Brando testifies to the sheer volume of human force that was sucked out of the universe when he died, in seeming defiance of the law of the conservation of energy.

It brings to mind what Frank O’Hara, who is himself dead now, wrote about other dead:

Is the earth as full, as life was full, of them?

When I watch these memorials, I sometimes wonder how much of their power derives from the viewer’s knowledge that their subjects have passed out of existence. Those dancers will never dance again. Those beautiful creatures are only dust. I wonder whether that would be apparent even to someone who knew nothing about Marlon Brando or Brian Jones or Nico or Edie Sedgwick, who didn’t recognize certain styles of hair and clothing, even certain kinds of film stock, as signifiers of the past.

Roland Barthes writes of the power old photographs have to part the veil of time and pierce the contemporary viewer, who through them briefly seems to make contact with the dead. Looking at them, you meet the gaze of the dead and know that the dead are meeting yours. Barthes calls this quality punctum.

There isn’t a trace of punctum in P-Diddy’s (then Puff Daddy’s) famous tribute to Biggie Smalls, “I’ll Be Missing You.”

Puff Daddy/Faith Evans/112, “I’ll Be Missing You” (1997)

That’s probably because there isn’t a trace of Biggy in it. It’s all about Puffy. Puffy on a motorcyle. Puffy falling off a motorcyle. Puffy by candlelight. A black-clad Puffy (is the suit Prada or Sean John?) escorting white-clad children through a meadow. It’s a tribute made by somebody so narcissistic that he can’t expend an iota of grief on the dead. Forget about the dead you loved, Dylan said, and apparently P-Diddy took him at his word.

The self is also the object of mourning in the video of Johnny Cash’s cover of the Trent Reznor song “Hurt.” But every moment of it is wounding.

Johnny Cash, “Hurt” (2002)

The mourner isn’t a sleek young man with his own line of clothing. He’s old and he’s dying, the dying king of an empire of dirt. His face is the coin of that empire, it’s graven with suffering. But you also see what he’s mourning, the radiant--but by no means beautiful-- young Johnny Cash, a figure as dark as the highwaymen in the ballads hill people sang before they invented Country, his skin pocked, his narrow black eyes full of humor and menace.

You see the young wife who wrote the song he became famous for, though it was all about what she felt for him, that terrible, damning love like a ring of fire. She’s gone now, and so is the young man she fell in love with, and all that’s left is the old man who inconsolably grieves for them and for himself.

Count no man happy, however fortunate, until he dies.

- Peter Trachtenberg

Juno Reactor, “God is God” (1997)

Pairing Arabic-flavored techno with a Busby Berkeley number for schizophrenics, Juno Reactor’s “God is God” appears to be patched together from silent Armenian films of the 1920s and artfully matched contemporary footage. The setting is a walled Middle Eastern city, whose inhabitants pass the time performing repetitive, stylized, and mostly purposeless actions. Whatever they do, they seem to do unchangingly, forever, the way people do things in hell. No one looks like he’s suffering much, but nobody’s enjoying himself either.  

The footage is either in sepia or washed-out color. In almost every shot the performers are arranged laterally in the space and move only from side to side. Almost everyone stares fixedly ahead, with the walled-off gaze of schizophrenia, so that when the male and female leads—the only people in the video recognizable as actors-- look directly at you, bolts seems to shoot from their eyes. It’s like one of those dreams in which the dreamer is only a spectator until one of his characters suddenly notes his presence and addresses him.

The video’s overstuffed tableaus and radical juxtapositions come out of the Surrealist playbook, as do the impassive faces of the performers, but there’s Expressionism here, as well. The membrane between what is inside and what is outside has been rent. Everything is charged with some nameless feeling. Maybe it’s anxiety—I’d be anxious, too, if a bodiless voice were telling me “You shall see good and Ee-vil.” Maybe it’s fury or a grave, unsmiling joy.

The architecture is the architecture of the subconscious, turreted, many-chambered, with faded frescoes on its ceilings and manholes that quiver slightly as men vanish down them, so that you half-expect them to lick their lips afterward. The only thing missing is shadows.

For those, you have to go to some earlier and purer artifacts of Expressionism, like Paul Wegener’s 1920 “The Golem.” Here, too, there’s a city, Prague. More than any other film genre, Expressionism is urban, like its sharp-dressing, wised-up offspring, Noir.

In cities people live packed together, like the throng seen filing to shul from an upstairs window. Closeness forces them to suppress parts of themselves; otherwise, they might kill each other. Yet all those discarded fragments of personality and desire keep coming back to invade any and every available space, and take possession of it.

Paul Wegener, “The Golem” (1920)

Buildings bend toward their neighbors as if whispering secrets. The tower in which much of the action takes place seems to be a cross-section of the inner ear. It’s not just architecture that’s animated this way. Every face in the film is contested by many feelings at once. Notice how quickly the expression of the young man pining at his sweetheart’s doorstep passes from bliss to suspicion to despair when he realizes that another man is in there with her. Check out his mouth. But his eyes are even more astonishing. If the performers in “God is God” never meet anybody’s gaze, the ones in “The Golem” look about them unceasingly, and their stares are boiling with meaning.

In silent movies, the performers’ eyes have to work overtime. Even the golem has the small hot eyes of a maddened boar (along with a hairpiece that is either a sheitel—the wig worn by Orthodox women-- or half a pumpkin shell). His eyes are where the life in him dwells, and when he’s deactivated they close once more.

Eyes also figure in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”—fittingly, since the doctor is a hypnotist—though, really, the most arresting gaze is that of Cesare the Somnambulist, who sees the future.

Robert Wiene, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920)

- Peter Trachtenberg