COCKFIGHT REVIEW IN THE LA REVIEW OF BOOKS

COCKFIGHTER OF THE YEAR
Dylan Adamson reviews Kier-La Janisse’s COCKFIGHT: A FABLE OF FAILURE
Los Angeles Review of Books, Oct 17, 2024
See in its original context here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cockfighter-of-the-year

WHETHER TO READ deeply or broadly—a question vexing enough to preclude reading at all. The same could apply to watching films. There are only so many hours in a day, and whole lives are spent scratching the surface.

As long as she’s lived, as she documents in her 2012 debut, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, author and film scholar Kier-La Janisse has lived with films. The book recounts a youth and young womanhood shattered repeatedly by trauma and abuse alongside Janisse’s efforts to understand these fragments of memory by way of genre cinema. On an episode of the Final Girls horror film podcast in the wake of the book’s 2022 reissue, Janisse told the hosts: “I wondered how I would separate the film and biographical elements of it, but at a certain point, I realized I just couldn’t.”

Janisse’s obsession has become her livelihood. If not quite to Tarantino-sized proportions, she has realized the Gen X cinephile dream, spreading her gore-soaked gospel in the form of festivals and microcinemas from Austin, Texas, to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Grind-house cinema has aged into quasi-respectability along with Janisse, in large part due to the latter’s efforts, and while she once traded in bootleg videocassettes, today she provides the liner notes for boutique Blu-ray releases. (Severin Films’ five-disc House of Psychotic Women Rarities Collection usually retails for $145.) House of Psychotic Women sold out several pressings, and the 10th-anniversary reissue supplemented the already robust annotated filmography with 100 bonus entries.

House of Psychotic Women, coining the survey-memoir subgenre, was necessarily broad by one axis and deep by another. As we learn about Janisse’s life, and still more about the reconfigurative role played by art therein, the films (and this is hardly to the book’s detriment) must often be treated glancingly. For a woman and feminist of Janisse’s stripe, extracting meaning from grind-house cinema is a labor of compartmentalization, and Janisse doesn’t so much cherry-pick as steal what she needs to survive. One feels an inexhaustible sensibility at work across the history of the medium, but it never truly focuses on any individual film.

Cockfight: A Fable of Failure, Janisse’s latest, out this summer via her own Spectacular Optical imprint, provides an ideal counterpoint to her previous work, and not just due to its title: Cockfight promises to go deep. On the heels of House of Psychotic Women’s success, Janisse has taken for her next subject director Monte Hellman’s understudied, underseen 1974 film Cockfighter. The logline: Frank Mansfield (Warren Oates), a veteran cockfighter, vows total silence until he wins Georgia’s coveted Cockfighter of the Year award. The film’s two primary ingredients are thus stated: silence and cockfighting.

Interestingly, some of the best film monographs from recent years have been devoted to non-silent films conspicuously lacking dialogue. Nick Pinkerton’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2021) spun Tsai Ming-liang’s muted opus into a 240-page meditation on the state of the medium. Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (translation by Natasha Lehrer, 2016) took a self-reflexive approach to Wanda (1970), another masterpiece of dialogic restraint. These are films that leave audiences room to wander, to spiral inward and outward toward something of and yet not of the film itself. Goodbye, Dragon Inn goes so far as to show cinema spectators standing and roaming from their seats. Apichatpong Weerasethakul welcomes the notion of audiences falling asleep in his films. Aural austerity thus becomes generosity to the extreme; in place of determined readings, these films offer the willing interpreter an unbridled freedom of mobility.

Needless to say, Cockfighter failed with critics and audiences at the time. Janisse’s new book inverts the film-life hierarchy implicit to House of Psychotic Women. Its subtitle, “A Fable of Failure,” suggests that Cockfight doesn’t propose to use films to understand life but, rather, examines the possibility of devoting one’s life to the understanding of a single film.

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Cockfighter was director Hellman’s follow-up to Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Starring James Taylor and the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson as a road-racing team traveling across the United States, the film promised to deliver on the hippie burnout energy that made Easy Rider (1969) a success. Esquire preemptively named it the “Film of the Year” and published the script in its entirety. And yet Hellman’s emphasis on interstitial time, his existentialist dismissal of cause for effect, fell flat with contemporary audiences. The Esquire rave review never arrived, nor did any review from that magazine, and the ensuant box-office flop was enough to get Hellman permanently exiled from Hollywood’s major studios.

Cockfighter would not be the film to bring him back to the bosom of the majors. Producer Roger Corman would later call it “the only film [he] ever lost money on.” Hellman, speaking to Janisse before his death in 2021, was baffled as to why someone would want a book about Cockfighter, the film he deplored above all others. But, as Janisse writes at the end of House of Psychotic Women, “I once told a friend that my life was just a succession of obsessing over the wrong things.”

Cockfight finds its most potent metaphor in the awkward rhyme between Mansfield’s quest for cockfighting plaudits and Janisse’s own need to redeem the film. His prize is the ring, hers is the book; Mansfield trains birds, Janisse dutifully researches the significance of the rooster in Greco-Roman mythology. At one point, she brings up the archaic practice of alectryomancy—divination via a chicken’s excrement, entrails, or feeding habits—and the parallels with her own drive to wring meaning from Cockfighter are evident. Cinephilia, like cockfighting, is the work of a lifetime. “I could relate to Frank’s wilful solitude,” she writes in the introduction, “and his skepticism of any brand of companionship, the criticism he tolerates for being alone. And boy, could I ever relate to his devotion to the type of work that brands him a fool.”

The book’s strongest section deals with the problem of the film’s authorship. Wading through a knotted production history, Cockfight (a title whose metaphorical aptness never slides out of view) opens with consecutive chapters on the film’s various male authors: writer Charles Willeford, producer Corman, director Hellman, and, finally, star Oates. Willeford was hired by Corman to translate his own source novel to a script, which, after Corman hired Hellman, was roundly rejected by the director, who hired his own man to rewrite certain scenes, a process that was interrupted by Corman, at which point the chimera script made it to Oates: an abundance of voices, more cacophony than chorus, that is nevertheless realized in the film as more or less unbroken silence.

“The Semiotics of Silence,” Cockfight’s most incisive chapter, culminates the section on authorship. While much of the book spreads out across the South, the history of cockfighting, and on-set footnotes supplied by seemingly every living (and dead) cast member, it’s here that Janisse leverages her impressive scope of research toward a truly dazzling analysis of the film. Pulling from Susan Sontag (“The Aesthetics of Silence”), and writing on figures from Clement of Alexandria to Samuel Beckett, Janisse examines the path charted by Cockfighter’s various authors through various modes of silence—of impotence, grief, shame, contentment.

A film, and Cockfighter more than most, is never just one thing. Though Janisse’s attraction to the film stems from its lead character’s single-mindedness, what she uncovers through her work is unfailingly multiple. Multiple authors, versions, meanings. If silence at first suggests an absence, it is filled upon reception by a shifting audience eager for signposts. Janisse’s craft is to never default to assumption. In her patchwork of the dumb, she distinguishes silence’s variegated streaks: the fear in contemplation, the religiosity of impotence. For his few words in the film, Mansfield emerges from the book a man of intricate complexity and conflict, and Janisse knows better than to attempt to reduce him to a single defined psychological pose. Not one reading but multiple.

And yet, this peak of Janisse’s analysis occurs just one-third of the way into the text. Silence can draw us closer just as it can repel us. Cockfighter doesn’t tip its hand much; aside from a few scattered moments of voice-over, we don’t hear Mansfield speak until the film’s final scene. His longtime sweetheart, Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy), agrees to attend the championship fight before she consents to marriage, needing to see the sport that has stolen her man’s voice. She runs from the bleachers, disgusted, as he is declared Cockfighter of the Year. When he catches her in the parking lot, she tells him, “You are not the man I fell in love with. Now I know you never were.” Mansfield, weeping behind his impassive mask, steps on his chicken to tear its head off, and thrusts it into Mary Elizabeth’s hands. She wraps it in a handkerchief and departs in her car. Turning to his cockfighting partner, Mansfield utters the long-awaited five syllables: “She loves me, Omar.” They turn back to the pit and the credits roll.

It’s less an ending than the promise of several possible beginnings. Cockfighting and loving emerge opposed yet inseparable, Mansfield compromised but full of the same, sturdy resolve. It may seem that he’s reached a breaking point, and could turn either to the pit or to Mary Elizabeth, and yet it seems equally likely that he’ll go on choosing both. Oates’s grin expresses a deeper knowledge than we will be privileged—the contentment in resignation, the resolution that comes with loose ends.

If, in “The Semiotics of Silence,” Janisse goes through the motions of proffering a thesis for her book, with a film like Cockfighter, she can only spiral outwards from there. Over the next several chapters, Janisse passes Cockfight under a variety of lenses—class, race, and gender, to name a few—interweaving notes from the production and release history. The depth of her research can be truly stunning; she has been working on the book in some form or another since 2001, and one doesn’t get the sense that she was wasting much time. Between interviews with Joe Dante, Lewis Teague, and Allan Arkush, one chapter sees a genial oral history of Corman’s New World Pictures emerge out of the blue. Janisse learns that Cockfighter was advertised under the alternate titles “Gamblin’ Man,” “Wild Drifter,” “Born to Kill,” and “Hatched to Kill” in Corman’s ill-fated attempts to wring some profit by adjusting the “cockfighting” and “nudity” knobs in subsequent releases. Though the film was disowned by seemingly everyone, Janisse is mystified to discover evidence at the Academy Museum that someone on the film submitted Cockfighter for Oscar consideration. Who is this movie’s champion? For a film of few words, Cockfighter nevertheless seems to present infinite lanes of inquiry.

Janisse’s examination of the film’s sole Black character, portrayed by Robert Earl Jones (“father of James, and himself a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance,” as a typical Janisse parenthetical might go), takes her study from academic surveys of racial politics in the cockpit to the cockfighting character Chicken George in Alex Haley’s Roots miniseries (1977) all the way to Claire Denis’s No Fear, No Die (1990). A chapter on the women of Cockfighter raises the stakes, imbricating Janisse’s own experience as a tourist in the cockfighting pits with the scant historical evidence she can find of a female cockfighting tradition. Grit and Steel, a cockfighting trade publication, appears time and again throughout the book, and in this chapter, Janisse finds one of the rare traces that prove so poignant in this world of few extraneous words. In “a rare departure from cockfighting-related news,” the editors mention the arrest of a local woman-killer, writing: “[W]e’re all breathing easier in Gaffney now.”

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The book’s afterword, titled “Cockfighter Aspires to Endlessness,” doesn’t attempt to give outline to a literary form still expanding in all directions. Through Janisse’s telling, the film emerges like Frank Mansfield’s silent mask, or the glazed eyes of a dead game chicken: a trance at once depthless and bottomless. In, out, up, down, it keeps going. One second you’re penetrating deeper, the next you’re staring back at yourself.

Among the numerous paths of inquiry that present themselves in Cockfight is the story of Laurie Bird, which is touched upon several times but never entirely focalized. Bird had a leading role in Two-Lane Blacktop and a relatively minor part in Cockfighter. She was Hellman’s girlfriend during the production of the second film and was, by all accounts, a nightmare on set. After Hellman, she took up with Art Garfunkel, whom she dated for five years until she died of a Valium overdose in 1979. Of their brief romance, Hellman would later write: “She memorized every line from every movie or play I ever directed. This was the truest act of love I ever experienced.”

Hellman dedicated his final feature, Road to Nowhere (2010), to Laurie Bird. The film tells the story of a director, Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan as a clear Hellman stand-in), adapting the story of a younger woman and older man driven to either murder or suicide for financial reasons that remain opaque to the end. Haven falls in love with his lead actress Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon), who might be the younger woman either disguised or reincarnated. It’s frequently difficult, in Road to Nowhere, to ascertain whether one is viewing the film or the film within the film—a zoom out can give context (a camera filming, the edge of a monitor), just as a zoom in can obliterate it.

The film is purposefully messy, its contradictions leavened and connective tissue left to the imagination. Two-Lane Blacktop’s image of the lonely road is spiritually replaced in Road to Nowhere by the interlocking highways of California, which all lead to the same titular destination. Some stories, maybe all, don’t end. In one scene, the actress asks Haven how many films he’s seen. He demurs, “We don’t really want to admit how much time we spend obsessing over other people’s dreams.”

“So I’ve seen your dreams,” she responds. “I know all the dialogue by heart, even.”

“She loves me, Omar” conveys the same love, grief, and resolve. Hellman zooms in and out across nearly 40 years, never arriving and never departing. If, from his perspective, Cockfighter was a minor work, Janisse hardly recognizes the concept. For Janisse, the film reverberates with Road to Nowhere’s same intensity of feeling, the same stubborn opacity. Janisse writes in the afterword, in reference to the film and, consequently, her own book, “This is something you don’t conquer.” There’s something to be learned about cinephilia, or life, in these lines. You can read deep to read broad, or read broad to read deep. Either way, it’s not going to end when the pages stop, or the credits roll.