Conspiracies and Crucifixions

The 9/11 conspiracy doc "Loose Change" and the "Sleepy Eyes of Death" samurai flicks on DVD.

The discrepancies and oddities that Avery et al. do point to (so many pulled from CNN and the like in the first hours of September 11, before the official story erased the mysteries) are mere fragments, of either a looming conspiracy or of a horribly complicated set of circumstances surrounding a spectacular act of terrorism. Which is it? I do not know and neither does Avery. But airliners do not evaporate on impact, then or now. Jet fuel does not burn hot enough and long enough to melt construction steel. A 500-mph airliner would not have merely left a 16-foot wide hole in the Pentagon and little else. Did you know Marvin Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, was an executive for both the WTC’s biggest insurance holder and the complex’s security company? Why did the lobby of Tower 1 immediately look like a bomb hit it, when the fire was more than 90 floors up? What about the hundreds of millions of dollars of missing gold bullion? (And the more than $200 million of it found in a loading truck in an empty service tunnel?) Why did Building 7 really fall?

Just asking, and so I say, Avery and his growing contingent should raise their shrill voices to the sky, let their imaginations run wild with the sparse evidence, and keep making movies that make the masters of the universe uncomfortable. Isn’t this democracy? We have nothing to lose, except the restrictions put upon free discourse and freedom of information we now tolerate because it’s so much easier to watch a fat face on Fox News tell us how to feel about the state of the nation. In the best of all possible worlds, the documents would be released, and reasonable explanations could be offered. But something tells me we do not live in that world.

What’s unarguable is that 9/11 conspiracy docs are tremendously frightening and depressing, and so there’s pulp to turn to, where a lone and dangerous warrior can cut a swath through an unjust world. Daiei Studios’ rambunctious “Sleepy Eyes of Death” films from the mid-‘60s fit the bill, featuring Raizo Ichikawa (the “Japanese James Dean,” because he died of cancer in 1968, after 12 successful entries) as a heartless, bitter ronin tired of killing virtually everyone in his path but too cynical about his fellow man and fate to resign himself to caring about anything at all. (The four-movie DVD box warns: “Contains violence, nudity and nihilism.”)

As samurai films go, they’re vivid and lively and impishly kinky, if not striving too desperately for physical conviction, and the fourth in the series, “Sword of Seduction” (1964), is a particular hoot, exploring the Tokugawa era’s persecution of Christianity and problems with opium, but doing it was gang rapes, crucifixions, a smack-pusher psycho princess, abrupt beheadings, whore-coerced missionaries, ritual sex and so on. In fact, there’s an enormous amount of sexual angst at play here, and even when being seduced, Ichikawa’s Bogartian killing machine is impossibly snide and cool. I found these undemanding, standard-issue programmers an absolute pleasure, abetted by AnimEigo’s meticulous subtitling, which doubles up in times of cultural friction, defining historical terminology rather than boiling it down to a rough equivalent.

“Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup” (Microcinema DVD) will be released on DVD on September 22nd (the previous edition, “Loose Change: Final Cut,” is available now). “Sleepy Eyes of Death” (AnimEigo) is now available on DVD.

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