Caught between the socio-historical cult of itself and its Beatnik players, and the excitement of its discreet yet radical formalism, 'Pull My Daisy' has been pawed over by the watchdogs and self-appointed guardians of avant-garde film since its first double-bill showings with John Cassavete's 'Shadows' in the late 1950's.
It was awarded the Second Independent Film Award by 'Film Culture' magazine in 1960 and attacked in the same publication by Parker Tyler two years later.
Based around Jack Kerouac's narration from the last section of his unproduced play 'The Beat Generation' (itself based on an incident between Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn), it's as much a document of its own unravelling as it is footage of some of the most acclaimed writers and painters of its generation at play. To reduce its web of dovetailing sound and image tracks into the semblance of traditionalist plot would be a misnomer despite the scene being set by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlofsky playing 'Allen', 'Gregory' and 'Peter', poets encoded in the heaviest of inverted commas, who implant themselves into an increasingly skewed Friday night tea party given for a bishop, his mother and sister at the wannabe 'respectable' home of Milo (a railroad brakeman played by the painter and musician Larry Rivers), his wife and young son.
Kerouac's voice, drawling like Burroughs, is the only one we hear, shifting from character to character, predictive-reactive, describing action, fantasising, meditating, sliding into and out of abstract sound, riddled with gags, games, allusion and metaphor that's connected and yet disconnected to, and made (non)sense of by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's pointedly casual camera and artsy asymmetrical framing. David Amram's score, like Kerouac's drift, slips from references to old-time Americana to the shrieks of free jazz. The film's opening announcement that we're watching 'A G-STRING ENTERPRISE' is a double pun as dirty an indication of the ride we're in for as the lyrics to its title track:
'Pull my daisy, tip my cup
all my doors are open.
Cut my thoughts for coconuts,
all my eggs are broken…'
From the beginning, this Boys' Club parody suffers no-one gladly and everyone joyously, Kerouac reducing Milo's painter-wife to housewife to a vibrato obsessed with propriety, keeping the home in order, impressing the bishop. It's a relentless dismissal that's offset by the film's soapy melodrama, and one that's equally applied to the bishop's mother and sister who sit in austerity on the sofa, unamused until they play a religious number on the organ that lurches ridiculously as they pump. Both a sit-com romp that tears hysterically through Rockwellian America and a simple-yet-complicated, elusively formal free-fall, 'Pull My Daisy' actually pays much less heed to naturalism than its champions would have us believe, its film-time making no attempt to replicate the actual time that some commentaries' 'slice of life' descriptions imply. Indeed, Parker Tyler's accusation that the film's 'as fresh as a frozen green pea'(1) might be a much more flatteringly accurate metaphor than he ever intended.
Poets are posited as bishops, bishops as poets and artists as saints. Of course they all behave badly, irony heaped in abundance onto each of them in the gap between what we see and what we hear. 'Alan' and 'Gregory' arrive laden with booze, 'hope bursting with poetry'. A shot through the window to the road below: 'there's nothing out there but a million screaming 90-year-old men being run over by gasoline trucks… so throw the match on it.' The poets' process is the banter of precocious teenagers. They scrabble around the floor like pretentious schoolboys, competing over their knowledge of Apollinaire. They ask the bishop about Buddhism hoping it means that everything's permitted (an ideal religion for the push-and-pullers?); does Heaven exist on earth? Is everything holy? 'Is girl holy? Is glasses holy? Is light holy?'. And in a climax that pre-empts this absurdist litany, 'Is baseball holy?'. Cut to a group of women on the street (the film's only exterior shot) listening to the preacher stood next to a huge Stars and Stripes flag which blows into his face as he mouths the words to a silent sermon – the visual gag equally undermining Kerouac's rhythmics with Buster Keaton aplomb. Ultimately, masculinity is pathetic, as heroic as its 'tortured socks' that the wife tidies away: nothing is serious, everything has meaning.
If Alfred Leslie's 2001 film 'The Cedar Bar' finds its cornerstone in his 1964 letter to Frank O'Hara describing an unprecedented 'parallelism' where 'the spectator will be in two places or more simultaneously' then both find a nascent correlate in the discretion of 'Pull My Daisy'. With its bawdy gags and caustic, iconoclastic humour, 'Pull My Daisy' is actually predicated on the delicacy of a subtly shifting interplay between modes of 'depiction', between record and fiction, self-awareness and dubious, wilfull naivete, debunking the ordinarily stable registers its surface (and our own viewing habits) would otherwise invoke. It's the root of an alternative formal trajectory, where the camera reveals itself not by the structural-materialist poetics of its own functioning but through the psycho-semantics of its (mis)alignments with the spoken word and film score. It's 'The Cedar Bar's twin tower, its historical mirror and formal precedent, a seminal nondocumentary document at the intersection of a mythologised New York and its artist 'heroes'.
© Ian White, March 2003
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