Vinegar Syndrome Pictures: The Scary of Sixty-First

[domino harvey]

The next Vinegar Syndrome Pictures release (their contemporary sublabel) is The Scary of Sixty-First. I was surprised when I saw this in theaters earlier this month and that it opened up with the Vinegar Syndrome logo, so I presumed this release was coming. That all said, I thought the film was a mess and a terrible pastiche of popular cult films (Rosemary's Baby, Possession, Persona, and Suspiria) all wrapped in forced crass language and lazy internet observations.

The director/star is funny on Twitter (or was when I still read Twitter) but in a way that tells me I don’t want to ever see a film like this coming from her

[soundchaser]

I remember finding the feigned cynicism on her Twitter (and seemingly suffused in her persona) acutely annoying, equally in a way that tells me I don't want to see a film like this from her.

[TraverseTown]

It's an extremely stupid film but I enjoyed it so much. One moment got one of the biggest laughs of the year from me:

Spoiler

When Anna Khachiyan (Dasha Nekrasova's real-life podcast co-host) shows up as a portentous clone doppelganger of Ghislaine Maxwell.

It's a supernatural-psychological-political thriller that feels the nightmare a Bernie Sanders supporter would have after being force-fed 12-hours of InfoWars.

[therewillbeblus]

The next Vinegar Syndrome Pictures release (their contemporary sublabel) is The Scary of Sixty-First. I was surprised when I saw this in theaters earlier this month and that it opened up with the Vinegar Syndrome logo, so I presumed this release was coming. That all said, I thought the film was a mess and a terrible pastiche of popular cult films (Rosemary's Baby, Possession, Persona, and Suspiria) all wrapped in forced crass language and lazy internet observations.

The director/star is funny on Twitter (or was when I still read Twitter) but in a way that tells me I don’t want to ever see a film like this coming from her

She's decent in Succession's third season as well, mostly because she's paired with the best character in the show as a possible love interest in what would surely be a kind of Punch-Drunk Love dynamic if it does become actualized. However, I watched The Scary of Sixty-First last weekend and it's awful: a poorly-made, ironic "dirtbag left" horror that is so bad it's difficult to parse out what is intentional or just oblivious in the execution on a minute-to-minute basis. This is no The Room.

[Never Cursed]

The next Vinegar Syndrome Pictures release (their contemporary sublabel) is The Scary of Sixty-First. I was surprised when I saw this in theaters earlier this month and that it opened up with the Vinegar Syndrome logo, so I presumed this release was coming. That all said, I thought the film was a mess and a terrible pastiche of popular cult films (Rosemary's Baby, Possession, Persona, and Suspiria) all wrapped in forced crass language and lazy internet observations.

The director/star is funny on Twitter (or was when I still read Twitter) but in a way that tells me I don’t want to ever see a film like this coming from her

Definitely not coming to the film from a totally neutral standpoint (I hate Nekrasova's whole shtick) but I must cosign the above opinions and say that The Scary of Sixty-First is really awful - not only is it the worst new movie I saw in 2021, but Nekrasova gives the worst performance of the year in it. It's all too reflective of the political brainworms that infect the whole Red Scare gang, and has several moments of unintentional hilarity,

Spoiler for the movie's funniest scene

the best of which comes at the end, where the presence of conspiratorial actors is confirmed when they leave a note that verbatim copies the scare letter from Eyes Wide Shut. I don't even like that movie all that much, but it's at once risible and downright insulting for Nekrasova's film to end with goofy shade thrown in the direction of the Kubrick.

The film won Berlin's Best First Feature award, which I can only rationalize if all the jury members were part of Nekrasova's creepy online fan club.

[diamonds]

Spoiler

Unless the definition of the word has changed, I don't see how she's throwing "shade" at Kubrick by quoting him. The film is also dedicated to him.

[therewillbeblus]

If I recall correctly, it is dedicated to him as "Stan" - didn't realize they were old chums!

[therewillbeblus]

Spoiler

Unless the definition of the word has changed, I don't see how she's throwing "shade" at Kubrick by quoting him. The film is also dedicated to him.

Spoiler

It's an ironic, partially mocking visual quotation - reverent to a point, yes, but also ribbing his movie for the absurdity of the conspiracy idea. The thing that's annoying about its usage is also the main problem with the film: it retains an unbelievably smug/ironic superiority to the films it's aping while also being infinitely more poorly made than them. Maybe there's a better phrase, but I still think that Nekrasova is "throwing shade" by exhibiting at once sincere appreciation and snickering mockery, and I think that attitude overall is quite exasperating in the context of this movie.

I too was skeptical about the reading of "shade" but your interpretation is a good one- the kind of ignorant condescension an irony-induced admirer might concoct without intent. Ah, the jewels of post-post-modernism.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

If I recall correctly, it is dedicated to him as "Stan" - didn't realize they were old chums!

Reminds me of the short cartoon Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown which ends with a dedication to Sam "The Man" Peckinpah.

[diamonds]

Spoiler

Unless the definition of the word has changed, I don't see how she's throwing "shade" at Kubrick by quoting him. The film is also dedicated to him.

Spoiler

It's an ironic, partially mocking visual quotation - reverent to a point, yes, but also ribbing his movie for the absurdity of the conspiracy idea. The thing that's annoying about its usage is also the main problem with the film: it retains an unbelievably smug/ironic superiority to the films it's aping while also being infinitely more poorly made than them. Maybe there's a better phrase, but I still think that Nekrasova is "throwing shade" by exhibiting at once sincere appreciation and snickering mockery, and I think that attitude overall is quite exasperating in the context of this movie.

Spoiler

I think this is a fundamental misreading of the ending. The film's raison d'être is the very real cover-up going on with the Epstein affair; it was born out of the sense of futility and desperation at witnessing the news cycle. The ending quotation isn't mocking the idea of conspiracy at all, it's an explicit confirmation of one following the breakdown where it seems for a moment like it may all have been a delusion.

FWIW, I also don't detect any illusions among the filmmakers that this is superior or better-made than the films it references. It's a scrappy, incoherent, energetic B-movie in poor taste and it wears that proudly. I view it in the tradition of other trashy American genre films like Deathdream and Welcome Home, Soldier Boys—films with a finger on the pulse of a real trauma related to American involvement in horrors that mainstream cinema won't yet touch. I didn't particularly care for the film on my first watch, but I do think there's something gutsy and, dare I say, admirable about the attempt.

[Never Cursed]

Spoiler

I think this is a fundamental misreading of the ending. The film's raison d'être is the very real cover-up going on with the Epstein affair; it was born out of the sense of futility and desperation at witnessing the news cycle. The ending quotation isn't mocking the idea of conspiracy at all, it's an explicit confirmation of one following the breakdown where it seems for a moment like it may all have been a delusion.

FWIW, I also don't detect any illusions among the filmmakers that this is superior or better-made than the films it references. It's a scrappy, incoherent, energetic B-movie in poor taste and it wears that proudly. I view it in the tradition of other trashy American genre films like Deathdream and Welcome Home, Soldier Boys—films with a finger on the pulse of a real trauma related to American involvement in horrors that mainstream cinema won't yet touch. I didn't particularly care for the film on my first watch, but I do think there's something gutsy and, dare I say, admirable about the attempt.

Spoiler

But the film has no coherent depiction of l'affaire Epstein beyond its most basic memed-to-death elements (bringing in disparate elements of a number of other conspiracy theories, including QAnon, to flesh out the details of Nekrasova's character's beliefs). I don't buy the closedness of the case either in real life, but this is not a film that depicts the case with accuracy or seriousness or even any levity beyond the archest and most obnoxious posturings and generalizations (like, for instance, the smug equation of the real conspiracy to the absurd Eyes Wide Shut cult). If the film is trying to treat the Epstein case with at least a metatextual seriousness (as in the examples of other B pictures you describe), why the word-for-word plagiarism of the note, or the visit to the crystal shop owner with all the New Age nonsense that's depicted as nonsense within the world of the film, or the inclusion of the phony Ghislaine Maxwell (an in-joke on multiple levels), except to indicate how oh-so-amusing the filmmakers find this milieu and all that is contained within it. None of these things are funny to an observer that isn't already in on a joke that the filmmakers were telling before the opening credits, nor are they insightful unless the depiction of bored idiots that fall into conspiracy through ennui counts for insight.

[diamonds]

Spoiler

I think we're coming at this from such diametrically opposed places that a consensus isn't likely. I don't find the cult in Eyes Wide Shut absurd, nor do I find the equation the film draws to it "smug," which strikes me as projecting onto the film a judgment about the creator made before the opening credits. Rather, I find the equation despairing and frighteningly true.

But the film has no coherent depiction of l'affaire Epstein beyond its most basic memed-to-death elements (bringing in disparate elements of a number of other conspiracy theories, including QAnon, to flesh out the details of Nekrasova's character's beliefs).

The film doesn't have a coherent depiction of the Epstein affair because there isn't one available. Really, I don't understand how you could demand that from this or any film. The staged-hanging illustrates that; it's an attempt to reconstruct an event that may not have even happened, a segment of time during which certain events transpired that the public will likely never have access to. It leads nowhere; it can't lead anywhere. (Eyes Wide Shut is quoted at the top of this scene as well: "The important thing... is that we're awake," before they pop pills. In Kubrick's film there's an ambiguity as to whether or not they really have reached a new level of awareness (hence the title). Scary suggests that question itself doesn't matter; eyes open or wide shut, we're completely powerless to stop what's happening).

Perhaps you experience the world differently, but I've found life itself to be an increasingly incoherent experience in recent times, and I don't see it as a knock against the film that the film expresses that. Is it "insightful"? I'm not sure, really. But I also don't think this film is coming from an intellectual place; rather, like Lynch's works (specifically The Return I suppose), I think it's channeling something more individually/collectively subconscious. A line I was repeatedly reminded of while watching Scary, from Zadie Smith's recent Intimations:

And I know [Myron] is fond of conspiracy theories, which I have never considered anything less than an entirely rational mode of processing contemporary American reality.

I like that the character's beliefs are muddled that way, that they resemble something like what "a Bernie Sanders supporter would have after being force-fed 12-hours of InfoWars," as TraverseTown so memorably put earlier in the thread. It would've certainly been easier and more... clear, both morally and intellectually, to talk about only the "correct" or more coherent conspiracy theories. But it wouldn't be as knotty or as accurate (not to mention entertaining, your mileage may vary) a depiction of modern Internet-addled malaise. It gets at that truth in the Smith quote about why people are so in thrall to narratives, so manic and desperate for even a fractured version of the truth. If insight is about understanding, then I'd say the film is insightful in a sense. Not many films even try to represent the Internet's effects on the human psyche, and it get points in my book for trying and coming pretty close.

As for the Ghislaine detail, a cursory search shows that the film was shot in January 2020. Maxwell wasn't arrested until July; at the time she was still at large, free to roam the streets of New York or New Hampshire. Perhaps it was an attempt to represent that nauseating idea (with a touch of impish humor, certainly).

Why the word-for-word homage in the note? Perhaps because on top of all the other things that it's about, Kubrick's film is one of the most formidable, enduring, and chilling depictions of the relationship between power, wealth, and depravity in cinema. (You obviously disagree). It's a way of calling upon a filmmaker Nekrasova obviously admires and a nod to the fact that he was onto something real about the world that he expressed in his fiction (which, it need not be said, has not always been popular consensus, and one of the things this film's existence really does hammer home is just how right Kubrick was about a certain strata of our society). And so his fiction recurs. And really, would you have found the film any better or even any less disagreeable if the note conveyed the same information but was worded differently? The worst thing I could say about it is that it's on the nose, which I can easily forgive given that the film is, after all, a debut.

[therewillbeblus]

The Scary of Sixty-First getting its own thread does not bode well for my 2022 aspirations

[Never Cursed]

Spoiler

I think we're coming at this from such diametrically opposed places that a consensus isn't likely. I don't find the cult in Eyes Wide Shut absurd, nor do I find the equation the film draws to it "smug," which strikes me as projecting onto the film a judgment about the creator made before the opening credits. Rather, I find the equation despairing and frighteningly true.

But the film has no coherent depiction of l'affaire Epstein beyond its most basic memed-to-death elements (bringing in disparate elements of a number of other conspiracy theories, including QAnon, to flesh out the details of Nekrasova's character's beliefs).

The film doesn't have a coherent depiction of the Epstein affair because there isn't one available. Really, I don't understand how you could demand that from this or any film. The staged-hanging illustrates that; it's an attempt to reconstruct an event that may not have even happened, a segment of time during which certain events transpired that the public will likely never have access to. It leads nowhere; it can't lead anywhere. (Eyes Wide Shut is quoted at the top of this scene as well: "The important thing... is that we're awake," before they pop pills. In Kubrick's film there's an ambiguity as to whether or not they really have reached a new level of awareness (hence the title). Scary suggests that question itself doesn't matter; eyes open or wide shut, we're completely powerless to stop what's happening).

Perhaps you experience the world differently, but I've found life itself to be an increasingly incoherent experience in recent times, and I don't see it as a knock against the film that the film expresses that. Is it "insightful"? I'm not sure, really. But I also don't think this film is coming from an intellectual place; rather, like Lynch's works (specifically The Return I suppose), I think it's channeling something more individually/collectively subconscious. A line I was repeatedly reminded of while watching Scary, from Zadie Smith's recent Intimations:

And I know [Myron] is fond of conspiracy theories, which I have never considered anything less than an entirely rational mode of processing contemporary American reality.

I like that the character's beliefs are muddled that way, that they resemble something like what "a Bernie Sanders supporter would have after being force-fed 12-hours of InfoWars," as TraverseTown so memorably put earlier in the thread. It would've certainly been easier and more... clear, both morally and intellectually, to talk about only the "correct" or more coherent conspiracy theories. But it wouldn't be as knotty or as accurate (not to mention entertaining, your mileage may vary) a depiction of modern Internet-addled malaise. It gets at that truth in the Smith quote about why people are so in thrall to narratives, so manic and desperate for even a fractured version of the truth. If insight is about understanding, then I'd say the film is insightful in a sense. Not many films even try to represent the Internet's effects on the human psyche, and it get points in my book for trying and coming pretty close.

As for the Ghislaine detail, a cursory search shows that the film was shot in January 2020. Maxwell wasn't arrested until July; at the time she was still at large, free to roam the streets of New York or New Hampshire. Perhaps it was an attempt to represent that nauseating idea (with a touch of impish humor, certainly).

Why the word-for-word homage in the note? Perhaps because on top of all the other things that it's about, Kubrick's film is one of the most formidable, enduring, and chilling depictions of the relationship between power, wealth, and depravity in cinema. (You obviously disagree). It's a way of calling upon a filmmaker Nekrasova obviously admires and a nod to the fact that he was onto something real about the world that he expressed in his fiction (which, it need not be said, has not always been popular consensus, and one of the things this film's existence really does hammer home is just how right Kubrick was about a certain strata of our society). And so his fiction recurs. And really, would you have found the film any better or even any less disagreeable if the note conveyed the same information but was worded differently? The worst thing I could say about it is that it's on the nose, which I can easily forgive given that the film is, after all, a debut.

Spoiler

I agree that we're coming from this from very different points of view, regarding both the film and its real-life basis. I guess I should start with the latter, which is to say that I reject out-of-hand a close comparison between the (known) details of the Epstein case and the fictional details of Kubrick's film. I'll "happily" cede all the known and many of the speculated elements of the Epstein case (most importantly to this conversation that Epstein gave other elites access to his network of child sex abuse), but that's still a world away from the ritualized and hazily glimpsed all-encompassing sex cult that Eyes Wide Shut depicts. For me to accept that the Eyes Wide Shut cult is at least a fitting analogue to Epstein's network, I'd need to accept that way, way more people than ever found in Epstein's phone books were involved in child abuse or proceeds from it, which is a QAnon/Pizzagate-level leap that I simply do not buy. I think it's also worth noting that the Eyes Wide Shut sex cult is deliberately absurd and expressive within the context of that film, existing more than anything as a frighteningly literal projection of the protagonist's own desires (with the ritualized elements a critical component of this). There's a reason Cruise is drawn again and again into investigating the details of the cult following his late-night encounter with them, and it isn't because the film is a coded exposé of elites. I'd be fine with a circumstantial invocation of this element of the Kubrick in the film, sarcastic or not, but to end the film on such a boneheaded and vacuous reference to it, to paraphrase TWBB's good words, an ignorantly condescending reference that does more to indicate the smug shallowness with which its writer approached the Kubrick (which she evidently likes!) than anything. I'll happily cop to a bias against Nekrasova from before I watched the film, but I gave the movie the same fair shake that I give all movies, and the result I found was that same facile pseudo-leftist approach to politics and art exemplified in everything else in which I knew her involvement.

Moving on more to the film itself, well, I'm not asking for the movie to solve the mysteries of the Epstein case or whatever, and I understand the stuff about the film's ultimate stance being an embrace of the mystery. but I'm sorry, I don't buy that the film is about the messiness of internet-fueled conspiratorial thinking, either. If the film were better-made, I think you could actually convince me on this point, but no, this is just an amateurish film (in its blocking and editing especially), and part of what rankles me so much about it is the implicit reclamation of these shortcomings by the filmmakers as scrappily and ironically charming, that "oh, isn't this just the worst" stance towards its own faults. Excuse me, I think I have something in my throat. I'm sure either of us could name many directors whose limited resources and comparatively low technical acumen manifested as rough charm (let's say, for instance, the earliest films of John Waters and some of the French New Wave directors), and we could also easily name directors who have successfully translated the information overload of the internet into hyperstylized and expressive but pointedly coherent films (here we can recall, say, Sam Levinson, Eugene Kotlyarenko, and the directors of Nerve). But The Scary of Sixty-First doesn't fit into either camp, nor in any other way that I can think of; it's just poorly made and expressed. We have too much money on-screen and too many talented crew members for the film to this strongly resemble the literal ugliness of a bottom-shelf giallo, complete with incoherent cross-cutting between transgressive sex scenes and ludicrously low-rent climactic violence. Again, Nekrasova knows what at least some of this looks like (she couldn't include all the visual quotations if she didn't), so the impression is... that she made a bottom-shelf giallo intermittently cognizant and not cognizant of its artistic badness while rolling her eyes and snickering the whole film through. This is not an artistic approach that inspires confidence in anything other than the conclusion that the viewer is being mocked for engaging with the film regardless of how they come down on it. I don't think this film has to come from an intellectual place to be successful, but this is not a film that has any deep internal wells of emotional resonance either (why the self-mockery?). I see the potential for a lot of audience and creator projection, but that just isn't the same thing.

And now for some smaller points:

I should also mention that, for a film apparently so dedicated to expressing the brain poison that can come from being too involved online, this film spends remarkably little time in or in conversation with the realm of the digital. Certainly its characters talk a lot about stuff they read online, but it isn't like the two conspiracy nuts at the center do more than a single moderately long Reddit/YouTube binge. In a world where movies like Spree are willing to take place entirely on the internet while still finding ways to aesthetically innovate, and where movies like Assassination Nation are able to seamlessly blend real and digital interactions to invoke paranoia and conspiratorial thinking (and it should be said that neither of these films were particularly expensive or difficult to execute), Nekrasova's film doesn't cut it as a film about the internet or internet-addled states of mind.

I might buy the argument about the Maxwell cameo if the character were played by anyone else. (For those unfamiliar, the character is played by Anna Khachiyan, well-known as the co-host of the Red Scare podcast with Nekrasova, and there's a clear "look! It's Anna K" element of her first appearance in the film that makes it clear that the joke is that Maxwell is being played by Khachiyan). I think this is another excellent indicator of Nekrasova's priorities with this film: she is ultimately less interested in conjuring the idea of Maxwell roaming New York and more interested in using that powerful image as an excuse to cast her friend and make a (lame) meta joke about the casting, like we're watching an Adam Sandler film and one of Sandler's SNL buddies shows up in a walk-on role. (Khachiyan isn't an actor, doesn't have lines, and doesn't resemble Maxwell beyond the superficial, so this is just gimmick casting).

[diamonds]

We're at an impasse here. All I will say is that I think reading the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut as merely or mostly a manifestation of Harford's supposed desires is far more shallow—and a rather odd approach to take with Kubrick, who elsewhere was never particularly prone to psychodrama—than a reading that takes into account the film's densely layered critique of capital and its proliferation of motifs related to imperial high society and the exploitation of women, which is what Nekrasova is clearly responding to in Kubrick's film. (And this has nothing to do with being a "coded exposé of elites"; Kubrick isn't a tabloid journalist, but he is articulating ideas about elite society. And although Scary certainly flirts with tabloidization I don't think the film is quite so easily reducible to that).

Nor do I think that a film needs to situate itself so firmly within or around the digital sphere to be "about" the effects that it has on life outside it.

We can at least largely agree on the unappealing periodic resemblance to 'bottom-shelf giallo'. I myself am no fan of giallo, and people who appreciate that style will probably derive more sensory enjoyment out of this film than I ever will. But I'm forgiving of occasional ineptitude if I find some level of engagement elsewhere, which is obviously all in the eye of the beholder (and I will say, I'd sooner rewatch this than Suspiria).

[therewillbeblus]

We're at an impasse here. All I will say is that I think reading the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut as merely or mostly a manifestation of Harford's supposed desires is far more shallow—and a rather odd approach to take with Kubrick, who elsewhere was never particularly prone to psychodrama—than a reading that takes into account the film's densely layered critique of capital and its proliferation of motifs related to imperial high society and the exploitation of women, which is what Nekrasova is clearly responding to in Kubrick's film.

It's the wrong thread to discuss this perhaps, but If Kubrick is engaging with this idea in his film, it’s peripheral and broader than high society. I can understand a pattern with the costume shop owner sacrificing his morality for capital to sell his daughter for sex, but that seems to be a much deeper idea behind how fractured our senses of self are when it comes to any forms of social transaction, relinquishing intimate engagement with self or others because it's vapid and intangible (hence why there needs to be a ritual to structure sexual engagement). In the film, things like sex or money can either be valuable or treated like objects with distance; the former situation occurs with the prostitute, who repeatedly yet compassionately rejects Cruise's money and is more concerned with intimacy regarding his good will than depersonalized financial assets. The film is much more interested in how broken we are- internally as a result of the unknowability of others and systems, how we cannot actualize omniscient fantasies in reality regardless of class, and the reminder of that impotence either causes existential crises, reversions to tangible assets divorced from emotion, or a directed focus toward getting power where one can, again separating this from emotion. It doesn't just extend to high society though, as Cruise's journey clearly encounters people in lower classes than his own who struggle with this experience.

[therewillbeblus]

For just $95, you can get an ill-suited format for a trailer to an awful film!

[Never Cursed]

Building that DIY 35mm film scanner to digitize this and nothing else