Turns out Kylie Jenner is Zardoz

This has been your obscure reference of the day.

Well, as long as I introduced the subject:

Zardoz is another film to compete with Road House as the best bad movie of all time. Entertainment Weekly summarized it as follows: “A silly, impenetrable movie starring Sean Connery (attired in the dumbest costume ever) as a ponytailed barbarian who obeys a giant stone head.” Roger Ebert wrote: “Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it.”

One of my former colleagues, a man who is now an accomplished full professor and will probably not admit that he ever wrote for Uncle Scoopy’s Fun House, reviewed it some 25 years ago. It’s an entertaining essay.

(He also wrote the entire page for some weeks when I took my then-young family on an extended vacation. In retrospect, I now have to concede that he was better at being me than I was.)

The review follows:

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Zardoz is a futuristic fantasy with a 60’s feel, in which the entire future lifestyle choice comes down to either a failed hippie commune or a brutal recreation of Taras Bulba. The movie starts with a disembodied head talking to the audience, followed by a giant stone head floating down from the sky, soon to be worshiped by various people in red panties or cheap Eastern European suits. The head is named Zardoz, and he speaks only to the panty-men, who are apparently in charge of population control. Zardy says, “The gun is good, the penis is evil, and I think the blender and the gall bladder could go either way”, at which point he spits out guns and enough ammo for the panty men to kill some more Eastern European refugees. The panty-men also wear droopy moustaches and red bandoliers to match their panties, making them look like the dream sequence dance numbers from a Broadway musical version of Viva Zapata.

One of the panty-men (Bond, James Bond) stows away in the stone head, and uses it to penetrate the dreaded Vortex, a sheltered bubble in which the inhabitants have advanced beyond homo sapiens, and are now immortal. Although they are advanced beyond comprehension, they grind wheat into flour with a technology from the first millennium. I guess it’s a whole hippie organic thing, because they all meditate together and dress up like a Peter Max nightmare of hippie existence, complete with beaded curtains and black light posters. They also live in an English country mansion and sew their own clothing, since the last GAP was closed hundreds of years earlier.

This effete ruling class has taken political correctness to an extreme, to the point where any non-correct thoughts are punished with “aging.” In a world where everyone lives forever, there is no death penalty, so the ultimate punishment is to doom people to living forever as senile codgers. The codgers, called “renegades,” live in their own part of the Vortex, where they spend every minute of every day and night dancing to old Jimmy Dorsey songs in a forlorn ballroom. There is one more immortal group in the Vortex, the “apathetics,” who have fallen prey to the ultimate disease of eternal life – no, not the possibility of watching re-runs of The Nanny forever, but rather boredom. Imagine if you had to live with the same 25 hippies, baking organic green bread and sewing your own clothes, every day for the rest of eternity. I know I’d become an apathetic.

When the brutal outlander penetrates the Vortex, things get really screwed up. The immortals want to study him because he can die, and his penis works, while theirs don’t. They’re really into the whole penis thing, so they keep showing Sean Connery nude mud-wrestling movies, in order to watch the effect on his dick. After 300 years of The Nanny, this must seem like major entertainment to them. Finally, some of the women come up with a rather self-serving way to impart to Connery all the knowledge of mankind. They do this by “osmosis,” which is their term for making a mind-link download to Connery’s brain, while he is making a penis-link download to them elsewhere. Remember, these women haven’t seen a hard dick in 300 years.

It later turns out that Connery is not really the savage he appears to be. The immortals begin to think something may be amiss when the “brutal savage” starts quoting T.S. Eliot from memory and playing the works of Rimsky-Korsakov on household appliances. It is revealed that Connery is a super-being who has developed an intricate plan to penetrate the vortex, destroy it, and let his fellow Pancho Villa panty-men inside to kill the immortals.

Upon further unraveling, we find that Connery himself was actually genetically engineered over generations by some of the immortals, as part of their long-term plan to end their infinitely boring immortality. At one point, the immortals who engineered the plan help Connery escape from the other immortals by dressing him up in a bridal gown.

In a final twist, when the ultimate Trickster tells Connery that he engineered the whole thing, Connery replies “But I have looked into the life-force that put the idea in your head.” Whatever that means. The trickster, Arthur Frayne, was the one who began the film as a disembodied head narrating to the audience, saying “I am Arthur Frayne, and I am Zardoz”. Then the camera zooms in on him and he has a moustache, goatee and eyebrows painted on with magic marker.

Poor John Boorman, the writer and director, was asked to do a commentary for the DVD, and even he finds the film embarrassing. He comments on some of the scenes, “Yes, well, it’s all rather absurd looking at it here, isn’t it?”. Most of the time he can’t think of anything at all to say, so he just rambles on about how Connery stayed at his house during the shooting, since it was only ten miles away from the seedy mansion that played The Vortex. Apparently, Connery was an exemplary guest who always played his music very low, brushed his teeth after every meal, and never left any of those dried toothpaste stains on the sink. I’m not making this up, by the way. Boorman really doesn’t seem to have any sense of what might make for interesting commentary.

There are some good things to say. I enjoyed the cerebral aspect of the movie. It is cheesy, and pretentious, and dated, and a lot of other unflattering things, but it also comes from an era when people used to come out of movies and talk about the ideas they presented. This film is filled with interesting ideas about the nature of immortality, and how it wouldn’t be quite as good as it sounds. Think about it, how would you keep from being bored? How would we punish people? How would we control the population? The world is overpopulated now, although we die. Imagine how crowded the planet would be if we all kept living forever. The basic ideas behind the movie were interesting, and the intricate multi-layered plot was clever and thought-provoking.

Unfortunately, Boorman got lost somewhere on the road that led from good ideas to a good movie. At one time he must have hoped for profundity, but looking at it now, it’s nothing but snicker fodder for undergrads. To paraphrase Churchill, never has it been so sad that something was so funny.