Fear #1 - No matter how much I scream, no one will ever really hear me
Every act is a communication and in genre cinema, the filmmaker is confined to strict parameters, where they are encouraged to frolic but not transgress. My stance, considering how much I have engaged with Ed Wood's work and criticisms of it, is that what caused audiences to sneer and mock his malformed creations was how close they were to resembling a 'real' movie. Wood did not intend to be avant-garde. He was no Kenneth Anger. He knew what a movie was and moulded one together through the disparate parts he had to hand and liberated the rest from the movies that raised him.
My favourite entries in Wood's filmography are the horror pieces: Plan 9 From Outer Space, Bride Of The Monster, Revenge Of The Dead, Final Curtain, Meatcleaver Massacre. Hell, I even like Necromania, his horror-porn flick about a man who can't satisfy his wife and enlists the help of some satanic women with vague but deadly powers. Each is distinct, and yet they are all stacked to the brim with signifiers of genre. Fog and candles and skulls. Lightning and graveyards and vampiric women wandering through the darkness. Characters in search of something they will never quite hold onto. Freaks and criminals and monsters, far more compelling than the perfunctory 'protagonist', who only really exists to describe how unnerving the events of the film are going to be. Wood signals to you with every frame that you are currently, in this moment, watching a horror film, knowing that you came here to fill your plate with all the trimmings. You may not be scared, but you won't leave empty handed.
Characters here are also set dressing, constructions of the constant narration and, as a result, they become extensions of it, iterating themes that can't be conveyed through the stiff acting and expositing in detail what no one had the time or money to shoot. Wood created as if the movie had to exist, as if it already did, and he was the one bending the story towards that existence by any means necessary. Why would it matter if a conversation between two characters just petered out? The scene after it, the one with Bela Lugosi's grasping claw and buzzing machine, is dessert - our little treat for enduring the mundanity of the police station and the suburban home. We love the night and its horrors because it is untethered to time, its darkness static and endless. Who cares what our main characters say or think or even do? I care more about Lobo, his covetous nature, his petrified face, his final act of redemption and revenge, all enacted without saying a single line.
Dialogue in an Ed Wood film is repetitious and almost becomes anti-image, explaining what layers of stock footage and camera movement cannot do. The words that emerge from the actor's mouths contort their faces and performances in such a way that they no longer seem human, as if they are entities play-acting the beats of polite conversation and failing to penetrate the surface. Polite conversation itself becomes a circular task, the screenwriter begging to not be misunderstood by being as transparent as possible but ultimately jolting the audience out of the movie with broken verisimilitude. Wood's movies become a microcosm for the explosion of rage that comes with being perceived as baffling and obtuse, only for this reaction to be the singular thing the audience remembers about the experience.
In each of these films, death becomes unfixed in some way. A horror for some, though there is a distinct pleasure in how obsessive this theme recurs. Death provides freedom from heterosexual marriage, from emotional turmoil, and also seeks to expose the foibles of society. At the same time, it's so clearly something that sends Wood's movies into deeply felt anguish, especially at the loss of time. Final Curtain follows a theatre actor scaring himself by imagining the horrors that lurk in the dark, with Wood's frame showing it to be entirely empty. It's not until he climbs the stairs and enters the room of a mannequin (who may also be a woman) that he begins to contemplate how much he likes bathing himself in fear, how it has allowed him something that he could not access in his waking life - the fantasy of pleasure, explicitly through gender transgression. Directly following this, our main character leaves this room, frightened by his vice, and enters the final room, containing only a coffin. He has run out of time. He will never know what it is to want and be seen wanting and be accepted anyway. No one will ever know. The film ends.
There is a coffin in the middle of a red living room. There is a coffin in the room at the top of the stairs. There is a coffin containing the (in)famous television psychic, Criswell, our narrator for the evening. There is a coffin containing a man who has come back to life. There is a coffin containing a colleague. There is a coffin containing a man you were sure was dead. There is a coffin you are being forced into. There is a coffin in a dream, a nightmare, in the fog, in the dark, lit so beautifully you thought it was real. It was on screen, wasn't it? Surely, that makes it real.
Fear #2 - The mirror, the projector, the images in the minds of the audience. None of me congeals. I am forever disparate
In a lot of ways, Tim Burton's Ed Wood is not about the filmmaker at all, and you don't need to be a Wood purist to have this reading of the movie. It meticulously recreates scenes from Wood's greatest hits using a budget that its titular character would have only dreamed of having. A snide part of me knows that Ed Wood (the filmmaker, not the movie) would have done some astonishing things with that kind of money, something no one who worked on Burton's movie seemed to grasp the irony of. It's very hard to be on board with this kind of punching down, Johnny Depp playing Wood as a naive, hysterical odd-ball who you root for but are still allowed to laugh at. Worse is that the film positions itself as taking light jabs at a close friend who would find all of this amusing, not a studio system repeatedly kicking a director who died younger than he should have, very much destitute from trying to pursue a moviemaking career in Hollywood. Not only does the system get to create the punching bag, they get to land some heavy blows to the solar plexus too!
Tim Burton's public image has only really soured over the years, with the re-evaluation of his beloved works coming up as far more conservative than his distinct, gothic-adjacent style would suggest, and his newer projects being soulless shilling for the system he seemed to be railing against. Despite repeatedly having access to money to make consumable products for Hollywood, Ed Wood seems to be Burton offering up the audience a point of comparison. It is clear that he identifies with struggle, despite never really experiencing it, and this biopic, as a result, is presented as a fun romp throught indie filmmaking, not an arduous uphill crawl to nowhere. Burton has a great amount of admiration for the process of stringing something together from very little and contexualises Wood's work within the events of his life as a means of bringing them value. They didn't need to be quality pictures, the movie argues, because Wood had such a great time putting them together and was proud of the end results.
Much of the tension, and ultimate irony, in the film is the incongruence between relentlessly pursuing something despite an evident lack of talent. Ed Wood is a movie about repeatedly failing in public and the comedy that can result from not realising how ridiculous you truly look. This is most insidous in the moments where Wood's affinity for skirts and angora are played for laughs at best and become rooted in bitter misogyny (and transphobia) at worst. See the scene where Wood emerges from a dressing room after arguing with the very Christian producers about Plan 9 in a full wig and skirt, pathetic and shrill the closer he is to femininity. In this moment, there is no tentative exploration of gender fluidity as had been present earlier in the film. Here, Wood chosing to transgress publicly like this is presented as sinking into vice for the sake of comfort, depicted as delusional because why would a cis (?) man believe that he (?) could do something like this and get away with it? There is an incongruence between the perception of Wood and the reality of the world that doesn't want him. Most of the time, the filmmakers want you to laugh.
But that's not all they want.
Post-The Golden Turkey Awards, which famously named Ed Wood the worst director of all time, there was a revival of interest in Wood's work, mostly in making cheap jokes about production value and former cast members popping up out of nowhere to do interviews and documentaries. Burton is playing with (and profiting off) the idea that the audience simply came to laugh at the failure of a (seemingly) obvious fool. The moments where the movie is able to elevate itself beyond this is where it becomes easiest to get swept up in the romance of getting your friends together to make a movie because it's an impulse you feel in your bones. Depp's Wood has an innate sense of self and doesn't diverge from it, even when it costs him his dignity. It's very easy to fall in love with a beautifully lit fantasy.
Bela Lugosi, played by Martin Landau in what is a viciously funny and deeply felt performance, becomes a living ghost of a dead future for Ed Wood. An out-of-work drug addict that people already believe is dead is banking his future profits on a director that cannot help him become successful again. Both Lugosi and Wood seem to tread water in each other's lives, but they are marvellously happy that they get to create with no rules, no net and no knowledge of what will eventually cause them to sink. Wood's affection towards his hero is infectious, especially as it is entirely in spite of the fact that he loves a bitter old man who isn't very nice most of the time. They bond over the poetry of gothic horror, how it allowed them to feel larger than life, away from the cold light of day. They sunk into each other's fantasy. And Burton can't seem to stomach how depressing it all turned out to be.
Will Sloan's part biography, part analysis and hesitant (re)appraisal, Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, attempts to question the extent that the labels of 'good' and 'bad' have actually been useful when interrogating Wood's work within the context of his incredibly difficult career and life, reiterating constantly that he was able to meaningfully create mood and setting, and had a firm grasp of genre, despite how his films have been milked for comedic material, a heavily embellished biopic and several documentaries that don't know how to reconcile the queerness of Wood in relation to the films he created.
Compelling in the breadth of his knowledge, Sloan spans the length of Wood's career, refusing to leave out the aspects too sordid for other biographical works - his pornographic films, his alcoholism, his (?) gender fuckery and (most importantly) the extent that all of these factors influence how far Wood can be seen as a legitimate auteur, with consistent themes and a recognisable style across his work.
There is a particular focus on how Wood 'craft[ed] cinematic dreamscapes inspired by the movies he loved as a child and infused his own eccentricities and concerns'. There is an unreality to his worlds, where the audience is never really oriented towards something corporeal, and therefore can only read it within what they do know, that being genre. Like Burton, there is a genuine admiration for how failure can produce something experiential. In analysing a much maligned director, the audience is forced to look at not just what is being broken, but at how the reality of the film is shifting around them. Wood is in control, and it hasn't been until recently that we have been able to look at how horrifying it is to not find your footing when all the signifiers, the stock character types and dinky little sets, are pointing you somewhere that should be obvious, but isn't.
And yet, there was a frustrating reluctance in Sloan's writing to fully commit to being a reappraisal. All admiration is repeatedly couched in the admission that Wood is still a bad director. Any time the book digs into the building blocks of his method and its resulting effect on the narrative, Sloan pulls back, as if the book itself is reckoning with how far praise can be extended, even in an argument in favour Wood's consistent creation of substantive meaning through image-making. There is still an implicit deference to normative filmic modes, even when those modes failed Wood in the first place.
As with any reappraisal, there is a fear that going too far in favour of something that has universally been marked as terrible will reflect poorly on the critic doing the praising. Reckoning with the extent that Hollywood has failed most people who have interacted with it, and also insisting that it is both the job of the audience and the critic to read movies within the standard that this system has set up, is a tricky line to toe. I don't envy it and my own attempts at reappraisal have still deferred to what was expected and what was received. Sloan's text spends a lot of time in the middle of this, never quite conceding that Wood's formalist approach was subversive in a good way, always being sure to highlight how far the films failed to meet classical Hollywood conventions, as well as Wood's lack of skill.
When discussing Plan 9, Sloan notes that, because its sets look as artificial as they do, it becomes hard to discern 'what "real" [even] looks like' anymore and that the audience, so attuned to being immersed within the world of the cinema screen, becomes stupefied as a result, 'lost in a void with no beginning or end'. When discussing who does and doesn't get to be an auteur, so much of the conversation comes down to intention, as if meaning is only created when we carefully consider our words, as opposed to frantically and passionately pasting together a collage of what is directly in front us. Ed Wood became an embelm of failure because he never seemed to do what we wanted him to, with the poverty and repeated rejection from multiple facets of the so-called normative world being obscured from view. While we were busy laughing at him, Wood's work sang anyway. It took a very long time for people to listen. I'm still not sure they do.
Further Reading:
Frank Falisi, Dreams for the Dreamers as They Are in Their Tortured Dreams | Bright Wall/Dark Room
Esmé Holden, Ed Wood Jr and the pain of pronouns | Little White Lies