‘Henry Fool’ - Review

“Porn is a phenomenon of transparency. The age of pornography is the age of unambiguousness…Even reading is acquiring a pornographic form. The pleasure of reading a text resembles that of watching a striptease. It derives from a progressive unveiling of truth as if it were a sexual organ.” - Byung Chul-Han, The Disappearance of Rituals (2019)

Creativity is a process that is all at once sensuous, perverted, humiliating, yet completely relaxing, self-affirming yet dissociative.  Agita, exodus, synchronicity, delusional mania, and finally, surrender to humiliation; every instance where I’m putting pen to paper for a story, either to be scrolled with the eyes or harmonically osmosed through the ears, entering the hamster wheel of creative work has always trundled me along a cycle of those five stages. The end stage of surrender is often a stumbling speed bump that whirls me down Agita Blvd. once again, a baseline grade of fidgetiness that can only abate with an esteemed voice telling me “what you just made matters the Most out of anything”. Obsessive exodus, synchronicity, and mania then take the ‘knowing’ as well as ‘action’ stages of creating, crystalizing the sense of “I’m having epiphanies right now, I’m outsmarting God right now!”. Speaking to a number of my friends and fellow writers/DJs/musicians, a lot of them seem to go down a similar avenue of thoughts, behaviors, patterns, and rituals; one of my old friends from Dallas likes to pop Adderall at 2:30 in the morning and dance to Mr. Rogers’ theme song whenever he’s stuck in writer’s block; another friend of mine incurs the mana needed to make hardstyle music by living with a woman who fries her brain with 8 balls so she can avoid her mandatory IDF conscription.

Writers, artists, musicians etc. are addicted to cycling their thoughts in hamster-wheel mode, it betrays a kind of stepped, one-foot-on-the-ground-after-the-other, notchy mode of thought that normies tend to digest and refract about their exterior worlds. They exist in a character archetype that we’ve all either met or are. Henry Fool explores the contrast of these two universities of thought with a level of depth and omniscience that fully wraps the Neurotic Creative™ into a neatly digestible archetype. Snackable archetypes are a hallmark among some of the most prolific filmmakers; one only needs to take a look at how David Lynch archetypes the distressed suburban housewife, or how Harmony Korine packages the precocious YOLO Party Girl who throws neuroticism about being trashy to the wayside. In these veins, a new archetype of the Neurotic Puer Creative™ has been birthed into the cinematic anthropocene, now that Hal’s collection has reached a new level of accessibility via the complete library of his films being added to the Criterion Collection (something that should’ve been done years ago but my rants about Criterion’s process on picking will be saved for another treatise).

I watched Henry Fool for the first time when I was a junior in college, living a life of insufferable existential torment complete with a sink full of moldy dishes, a knockoff Squire bass I got from a Taos oxygen bar owner that I never learned how to play, and a gorgeous, pillhead, alcoholic boyfriend who made me watch post-season 3 Broad City. Hal practically pressed my face against the screen with a gun to my head as I was flipping through the thislight Google drive movie stockpile I had in my computer. So much of age 21 was defined by bumbling away at my squalid attempts at avant-garde existence; reading calculus textbooks with my boyfriend after chugging two whole flasks of whiskey just for the fun of learning, creating hang drums from empty propane tanks that weren’t really in tune, indulging in klonopin even when God’s puppet strings were telling me kratom was the answer, learning how ProTools worked and promptly doing very little with that knowledge, and leaving my neuroscience program a year after bragging to all my friends and sexual conquests how I worked in one of the coolest labs of all time (It wasn’t, and all I did was operate MatLab, but it is enough, as I’ve learned, to mythbuild with a gallant might). Hamilton Morris was my muse and I wanted to be painted in the image of a freaky brainiac that made kooky stuff on the side, even though I was the one who had to do it, and, I had about as much paintbrush dexterity as the permanently spooked cat that lived next door to me at the time. 

My biggest lesson in grasping that paintbrush came when I befriended a man nearly a decade my senior who was a dropout of the Iowa University writing program, who siphoned his electricity from the next door neighbors and slept on a mattress littered with cigarette burns set amongst a quadtych of walls that were all four different colors and chipped in various shapes and symbols. Scintillatingly pretty in the same way that Bradford Cox is, he stepped to my altar of bohemian ineffectiveness by highlighting first and foremost how somber and grief stricken my eyes looked. Some could say that was my first exposure to the concept of semiotics, others might say that this was my full tilt into the pail of bohemian destructive ennui, my mother would mark it as my tilt into the pail of the American indulgence of addiction and Believing The Idea That The American Dream Might Be Fake. Any way you slice it, the slices were a picturesque beauty of ennui that ultimately amounted to my current economic successes of $167.79 in my savings account and possessing an antique carnival glass bowl that houses dead rose petals that could go for maybe twice that price on eBay. But what matters is that I was charming and looked hot throughout the whole process, right? My ennui was constructive in a way, right??? How has Henry accomplished any of those milestones? What has he constructed?

In Henry Fool, our hero Simon Grim starts off as a demure garbage man, who moves about life in a solipsistic, almost autistic droll of gazing at the ground, averting eye contact with strangers, only peering his gaze at the most peculiar and perverse distractions, and hilariously rejecting the consequences of his peculiar tics when said distractions come back for their second acts. Born into a working class Queens family with a permadrunk floozy sister and a reclusive, ill mother, he has all the makings of a prolific writer that only needs a sinister and bombastic outside influence to get the pen to hit paper. Enter Henry, a total antonymic bumbler and ennui-ridden bastard who’s always musing about people who are after him and want to see him fail, the delusional manic idea that he’s about to get publicly executed and humiliated at any moment, almost to the point where he seems to have a fetish for it. We never know the nature of his transgressions until the middle of the film, when it’s revealed that he served time for molesting a 13 year old girl, blasting open the innards of a little boy who probably lived for wedgies in junior high and in present 2023 times would probably nut from being findommed by 73 year old women named Petunia, out into the open for all the audience to relish in. 

Henry is a character who has been carbon-froze in the surrender of humiliation phase in the wheel of creativity, a mind that has paralyzed when the ultimate price of social execution becomes a reality when his obsession with transgression leads him to pathetically lock himself in a permanent state of teenageness, constantly craving play but unable to complement it with structure. When Father Hawkes tells us “There’s hope for everyone, even Henry”, we know exactly that Henry’s about to sink into the darkest recesses of which there is no return, eliciting a wicked cackle from anyone who has half a brain. An honest man is always in trouble, but mainly in trouble for having his own balls fed to him. Oh Henry, ever the dreamer of auteurship sans the cerebral force, ever the bohemian layabout who’s launchpad for stardom is squandered because his bombastic, sinister devil on his shoulder is himself. His solipsism, drunken overconfidence, and his chakral prison doom him to living the childish distress of rocking back and forth inside his own head, chthonically chasing destruction in lieu of construction. 

During my sophomore year of college, I took a class on Jungian theory where I learned about a concept called the Provisional Life. “A term used to describe an attitude toward life that is more or less imaginary, not rooted in the here and now, commonly associated with puer psychology”, the provisional life is one that promises so much yet delivers so little. The relation one has with a provisional life is often comparable to an intricate dance, a dance where one person is always behind by half a beat, akin maybe to a graceful dancer (senex nee elder) having to match pace with a dawdling drunkard (puer nee child). Dawdling drunkard, wasn’t I just talking about someone like that? To observe Henry’s dance through the tribulations of his ‘confession’, he inches closer and closer to the ideal of drunken existence, the existence of an innocent child (the Puer), absolved of responsibility to deliver in a world that draws swords against you at every moment. In the world of being an artist, this yearning for an eternal childhood is in direct opposition to the mission of creativity, a mission of connection and to meet the external world, to live in the real world and to not dusk in the shadows. 

More and more we see Henry’s real form shrink further and further into the shadows, with little form of the elderly senex coming to offer wisdom. Creativity for Henry is never manifested in the balanced form between the senex and the puer like what is witnessed in Simon, and towards the end of the movie we see Henry retreating into the ultimate fantasy of the eternal child, hopping town on a one way flight to Paris. Subsuming Simon’s entire identity in the process, Henry accomplishes his primal crazed desire to retreat fully into the shadow of eternal youth, his wheel of creativity disassembling and piling onto the ground resembling a string of misshapen speed bumps, downgrading him from being an artist to the painful plight of being a shadow-bound normie like so many of us are doomed to live. When I think on my shadows, in contrast, I see a cogent agreement beginning to form, my senex’s dance partner beginning to regain rhythm, and my wheel reassembling itself into a steady circle, as I crave a new mission to meet the external world myself.