Society and the Spectacles

An Allegory of the Cave for the age of conspicuous consumption? Or a genre throwback that opens one’s eyes up to little more than the director’s faux-paranoid resentment of the dismissive elite? The terrain mapped out in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) is broad enough, and politically incoherent enough, to accommodate such seemingly incompatible readings. Its central conceit—that global power is being sneakily usurped by alien creatures Jonathan Lethem, in his excellent monograph on the film, pithily describes as “monsters from the yuppie id,” thanks to a consciousness-altering television signal that blinds us to oppressive subliminal commands and to the usurpers’ carcassy ugliness—might seem far too obvious a metaphor to be “read” at all. But among the many reasons that They Live still lives as a cult film is because that central conceit, along with the director’s peculiar approach to storytelling and social commentary, congeal into thick stew of blurred intentions, mixed conventions and gleefully dumb entertainment, hitting a sweet spot somewhere deep in the collective psyche.  

A strapping guy wearing plaid, denim, leather, a backpack and a mullet strides into Los Angeles. He’s looking for work and means business—he even has his own tools. “I believe in America,” he says, though he’s suspicious of its unions, or at least Chicanos. He’s our hero and surrogate, not an American everyman exactly—he’s played by a pro wrestler, after all, and a Canadian to boot—but a neutral, a mind-yer-own-business type, an insignificant—the credits reveal his name to be Nada, Spanish for Nothing—a guy who doesn’t rock the boat. Until the boat rocks him. Nada finds a place to sleep in an inner-city hobo campsite called Justiceville. (These days it would called Occupy Hollywood.) But while the cops barge in and tear Justiceville up, Nada begins to sniff out an underground movement with a pretty wild conspiracy theory. The revolutionaries try to alert others to their claims, but everyone, yuppie and prole alike, is too busy watching lobotomizing TV broadcasts to care. Long story short, Nada comes to see what the underground is on about. He acquires a pair of shades that look like Ray-Ban knockoffs—which look kinda funny with his worker gear—and allow him to see things as they really are: billboards and print media ordering us to OBEY, CONSUME and PROCREATE, and those carcassy creatures, called “ghouls” in the credits, who look like us without the glasses, and are assuming all positions of power and influence. Nada sees the monsters for what they really are—and Nada’s going to take action. “I’ve come here to chew gum and kick ass,” he declares. “And I’m all out of gum.” 

But first he has to kick his friend’s ass. The best/worst (but mostly best) scene in the movie, and the most wildly homoerotic: Nada, aka Rowdy Roddy Piper, tries to convince his buddy Frank (Keith David) to don the shades. Frank refuses and refuses and refuses, so… get ready to rumble! The buddies fight in an alleyway, punching, kicking, pile-driving, kneeing in the balls—for six minutes! “Put the glasses on!” Nada demands. And really, why won’t Frank just put the glasses on? Why is he so resistant? Is it because, subconsciously, he already knows, already sees the ghouls? Because the glasses are a mere prop, granting us granting permission to “see” what was always in plain sight, ie: the apparatus of ideology? Is this gloriously ridiculous movie trying to tell us something? Of course it is. But don’t take it at its word. There's more going on than even the movie itself knows. Look deeper. Look long. Seeing is believing—so long as you’re wearing the right glasses. 

The abyss at the end of the Rainbow

A teenage girl is confined to an antiseptic room. A thin man with vampire lips and hair helmet observes her, interviews her, seems impatient with everyone but her. They meet in some vast, windowless clinic-laboratory with a staff of maybe three, conducting experiments that will ostensibly improve the human race, though this “practical application of an abstract ideal” is itself pretty abstract. No matter. Surrender to the undertow. The mood is doom. The year is emphatically 1983 (the year of Videodrome), a time, we’re told, of “great uncertainty and terrible danger,” though by the time the hermetically sealed, eerie-hypnagogic womb-world of Beyond the Black Rainbow opens itself up to the familiar world, the one the rest of us inhabit(ed), that danger appears to stem largely from shirtless camping bangers with too much alcohol. Perhaps the real danger comes from within, within the womb-world, within the damaged mind of old vampire lips, or within the fabric of the film itself.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is the impressive first feature from writer-director Panos Cosmatos and his fellow Vancouver-based collaborators. It’s low, very low, on plot, and even lower on exposition, but overflows with precision atmosphere of high retro-techno-gloom. It’s probably a good movie to take drugs to, though you’d best choose a drug that will last a while and keep you awake. The pace is deliberately somnambulistic, with a synth-drone score from Sinoia Caves, a.k.a. Black Mountain keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt, that feels like an homage to John Carpenter. It’s furnished with items from the Stanley Kubrick clearinghouse, and is wall-to-wall cryptic portent: weird lights, unnerving room tones, scary stuff on TV: cartoons, documentaries about Hawaii, Ronald Reagan. There’s glass everywhere, doubling figures that otherwise never share a frame with anyone else. Life seems painful for everybody in this lonely, oppressive landscape. There are many luminous objects to touch yet no one touches anyone else. Cosmatos renders things mostly through close-ups, the faces uniformly pushed to one side of the anamorphic frame, wide dollies of long corridors (one of several ways in which the film echoes The Shinning as much as it does 2001), and some truly impressive psychedelic eyeball imagery bursting with saturated colour and handsome soft focus grain that bleeds from one scene to the next in woozily long dissolves. (The available stills from the film do not do its visual inventiveness justice at all.)

Elena (Eva Allen) is the girl; Barry (Michael Rogers) the man who controls everything she learns. “It’s easy to become disillusioned when you don’t know who you are,” he explains. “Or what you are.” Though Barry’s greater level of awareness doesn’t seem to console him one bit. He gets his drugs from a place called Benway’s Pharmacy, which if you’d ever read William S. Burroughs you’d probably avoid. In a weirdly monochromatic flashback we see how 17 years ago Barry went to hell so as to pass through the eye of god, which he describes as “beautiful, like a black rainbow.” He got eaten by great clouds of goo and gas and came back covered in crude. Elena was born then, and her mother disposed of. The appointed harbinger of a New Age, Elena clearly possesses some special power that needs to be contained. Beyond the Black Rainbow lurches toward Elena’s emergence from her container. What will happen when she’s let loose upon the world? I have no idea. But if you see her on the street when you leave the theatre you’d best walk in the opposite direction. 

  

The Thing: Fear the familiar face!

When Hollywood endeavored to remake The Thing From Another World (1951), the late screenwriter Bill Lancaster wisely opted for a radical re-imagining, going back to the source material for inspiration, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled Who Goes There? Chief among the distinctions between The Thing From Another World and what would simply be called The Thing (82) was the decision, very much in keeping the Campbell’s narrative, to render the titular alien not as an angry salad bar in human form but rather an interplanetary chameleon, a parasite able to rapidly assume the form of whatever host organism it came into contact with after being thawed out by a Norwegian research team in Antarctica. They say mimicry is the highest compliment.

However, Lancaster’s script also differs from the earlier movie in that it features not a single woman. While the presence of women in the earlier movie could be written off as pandering to a broader audience with the arbitrary injection of a love interest, an argument of equal merit could be made that a great opportunity was lost in the resolve to make this an exclusively masculine story. A feminine perspective could have pleasingly complicated the deeply uneasy, paranoid group dynamics of The Thing, and you have to wonder if the absence of women didn’t emerge above all from squeamishness on the part of the filmmakers, all of them men, who may have felt uncomfortable with desecrating female bodies with the same infamously ferocious and nauseating zeal applied to those of men and canines throughout.

The Thing begins with a pretty corny looking flying saucer crashing into Earth, leaving no ambiguity as to what we’re dealing with from the get-go. There’s only a short, divertingly portentous half-hour or so between this cosmic establishing shot and the first manifestation of the alien presence in the encampment’s Husky cage, with flesh flying off of this poor pooch’s skull like a self-peeling banana, and blood-smeared spaghetti whipping around the room to ensnare the other dogs. The alien’s use of familiar flesh as a sort of Trojan Horse reveals a similar tactic to that of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), which was also imaginatively updated and remade in a version directed by Philip Kaufman in ’78. But in The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, the process of transfiguration is itself the central concern of the movie. It veers away from the concerns of science fiction and into that of horror, emphasizing repeatedly the body as a site of grotesque violence and chilling anonymity.

The Thing, when not making you want to vomit, is pretty fun, another Carpenter siege drama where evil is evil and the good guys do what it takes. But I can’t help but imagine a David Cronenberg version, a movie far more curious, speculative and precise in its biological exegesis and bearing greater pathos. Undoubtedly Cronenberg, like the scientist in The Thing From Another World, would be more sympathetic to the alien than Kurt Russell, who rarely puts on a hat in the –40 tempests and eagerly torches everything in sight. But maybe we should be imagining a Werner Herzog version. Early in The Thing a characters named Windows tries to get in touch with his colleagues at McMurdo Station, the setting of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (07). Would those endearing misfits at McMurdo, spanning many countries of origin and encompassing both genders, have been able to fight off the alien? Or might they have embraced it as just another fellow outsider, far from home and in search of communion?

If I were John Carpenter and you were a Satan: revisiting Prince of Darkness

In some dilapidated, out-of-use Los Angeles church sits the ultimate cocktail. It swirls in a cylinder, demon-green, smoky, and capable of inducing a hell of a mean drunk. Donald Pleasence is a priest who enlists Victor Wong’s cockeyed, waddling old professor and his finest PhD physics students to come and investigate the weirdness. According to the promptly decoded accompanying literature the cocktail is actually the Anti-Christ, waiting to materialize and enter the world all decked out in Nosferatu garb. The local homeless population, overdressed and uniformly grotesque, stand around like catatonics apparently waiting to do the evil one’s bidding, whereas the Anti-Christ has to hork loogies into the mouths of the smart middleclass academics to get them playing on his team. One of them turns into a pillar of bugs before collapsing in the parking lot. Another has her skin turned inside out and hangs before a mirror to take Satan by the hand and pull him out. Tachyon transmissions from the future override the dreams of all involved. “Our logic collapses on the subatomic level into ghosts and shadows,” says Wong. It also collapses at the movies, which can invade our subconscious even while our conscious mind knows perfectly well that what we’re watching is very, very silly.


Prince of Darkness screened last night at my neighbourhood second-run/rep cinema. I was eager to revisit the film after having last seen it at least a decade and a half ago—the length of my adult life, basically. I was prompted not only by a voracious appetite for horror, not only by a longing to remember what it was about the film that scared me so intensely as a kid. (For the record, it was the grainy television broadcast dreams from the future, as well as that startlingly despairing image of a woman suddenly finding herself trapped forever on the other side of a mirror with Satan. Plus, well, anything apocalyptic freaked me out as a kid.) What drew me to watch Prince of Darkness again was also my recent reading of Kent Jones’ eloquent 1998 essay on Carpenter, ‘American Movie Classic.’ Jones is one of the very few critics whose work has not only enlightened but actually moved me, and his heartfelt defense of Carpenter’s oeuvre struck a chord, especially since it reminded me of one of the most arrogant things I think I ever wrote in my shambling, accidental career as a critic. It was something to the effect of Carpenter seeming like “kind of a dumb guy.” I won’t try to justify this now rather embarrassing statement other than to say I was reviewing Ghosts of Mars—sorry, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars—I was very young, and I was trying on what I thought might be the critic’s cloak. (Rest assured, a reader did write in to take me to task for this.) The one piece of advice that Paul Matwychuk, my first editor, always stressed when asked was that I should be more opinionated. He was absolutely right to do suggest this to me, but it’s an inherent risk of the trade that sometimes being opinionated winds up making you sound like a nincompoop.


“Carpenter stands completely and utterly alone as the last genre filmmaker in America,” writes Jones. My first response to reading this was, what about Carl Franklin? But my second was a sense of the genuine nobility of this role in the film industry, a role once filled with such dynamicism by the likes of, to use Jones’ examples, Edgar G. Ulmer or Robert Siodmack. Cinema history has taught us repeatedly that working—seemingly—within the dictates of the establishment, within the literal generic, offers filmmakers unique opportunities for subversion, subtlety, sophistication, and signature. But with the exception of Assault of Precinct 13, I confess that all my recent Carpenter viewings—which by means have been complete—have left me questioning again and again the distinction and richness of the filmmaker’s contributions to the various genres he’s dealt in.


Prince of Darkness is an interesting case study, written by Carpenter under a pseudonym, featuring no stars to overshadow the general buzz of collaboration under the guidance of a by then highly respected auteur—or to cloud the frequently awkward, faux-banal dialogue, hokey exposition, shrugged-off love story, or somewhat muddled treatise on the limits of science and religion and the ostensible urgency of their marriage. Of course, those TV news footage dreams and that through-the-looking-glass death shot endure, still freaking me out between my spells of hypnosis induced by yet another of Carpenter’s thin, monotonously portentous synth scores, and fits of spontaneous laughter, from myself and my fellow audience members, over Pleasence’s hammy monologues, Alice Cooper’s rather improbable impaling of a guy with a bicycle, Satan’s overwrought messages warning of his wrath, his acrobatic zombie minions, and that guy from Simon & Simon, who actually gives a fairly solid performance but whose moustache dances every time he smiles. (I should add however that Wong is terrific in the film, and the ending is quite nicely timed.) Jones champions Carpenter’s willingness to tell stories where protagonists are confronted with some pure, external evil, but I still question the depth of Carpenter’s investment in evil in Prince of Darkness as much as in Christine, where the car from hell is so inane it demands to take a backseat to the much more stimulating relationships, the nicely rendered air of teen alienation, and the filmmakers’ obsession with the vestiges of the 1950s. If only those elements, all of them worthwhile, could take control of the film rather than finally submit to the cornball, humdrum horror movie plot mechanics.


I’ll keep at this task of watching Carpenter’s films, probably every last one of them, partly out of my attempt to understand Jones’ fascination and respect, and partly because the truth is I have yet to see a single Carpenter film that’s all bad. Each seems to have its charms, the craftsmanship brought to the simplest details especially. The details are as consistently winning as the premises tend to feel negligible, leaving you wondering what does Carpenter really care about? What does he really want to share with us? What in these stories really speaks to him? I remember watching him interviewed on television and hearing him say that movies don’t scare him. So maybe that’s my fantasy John Carpenter movie, the one where we might actually get some glimpse at what really scares, beguiles, or moves John Carpenter.

Remake/Remodel: Last House on the Left, Assault on Precinct 13

There are remakes and there are remakes. Remakes, renovations, revisits, re-imaginings. The terms mystify. Some sequels are actually remakes. Some remakes simply regurgitate foreign language hits into English. Some remakes, like Psycho (1998) or Funny Games (07) are close to Xeroxes, yet are often most interesting for revealing all those things in movies that can’t be Xeroxed. There are movies, such as Solaris (02), that we call remakes but are actually going back to the literary sources rather than the earlier movie. There are movies, such as Cat People (82), that we call remakes yet share very little with the earlier movie aside from its title. Some remakes aren’t initially presented as remakes at all, but are. These can be extremely interesting.

Adapted by novelist Ulla Isaksson from a 13th century ballad, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (60) is a bracing study in crime and punishment, revenge and repentance. Against Sweden’s larger paradigm shift from paganism to Christianity we see Karin’s transition from childhood to womanhood, a transition brutally interrupted by rape and murder. Soon after discarding her body stripped of valuables in the woods, Karin’s vagabond assailants take refuge in a nearby home. The home, it turns out, belongs to Karin’s family. The parents learn of their daughter’s fate and exact their wrath methodically and without mercy. It could almost be a horror movie.

Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (72), newly reissued to coincide with the theatrically released remake, is itself a remake of The Virgin Spring. Its source material is uncredited, but justly so: it serves as a skeleton for something genuinely fresh, distinctive and autonomous. Craven’s Mari is, like Karin, pretty, somewhat spoiled, and blooming into a woman. The cultural paradigm shift depicted here however is a sort of reversal of that of 13th century Sweden, with Mari’s womanly awakening coinciding with the sexual revolution and the movement away from Christian values to neo-pagan ones. Craven accounts for the shadow side of this revolution by injecting  elements of violence that vividly recall the Manson murders.

Only a dozen years passed between The Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left, but standards of acceptable content went through their own sort of paradigm shift. Mari appears during the opening credits through an opaquely dappled shower door. She’s clearly naked, but we can’t yet see her nakedness, as though Craven is granting her one final moment of innocence before extinguishing it in a flurry of corruption and butchery. Craven’s rapist/killers force their victims to pee in their pants. They denude and disembowel them, and we see about as much of it as the low-budget camera and effects work provides for. Yet curiously, while Last House on the Left is more shocking than The Virgin Spring in the explicitness of its violence, it never even comes close to reaching its predecessor’s level of soul-chilling brutality. Craven skips Bergman’s final sequence of repentance, opting instead for an abrupt ending, signaled simply by the completion of the killing. Something is missing here, and you don’t need to know The Virgin Spring to feel it. But this absence is itself indicative of something happening in the post-hippie, teen exploitation milieu Craven’s movie inhabits. It is a far sleazier, clumsier movie, and I’d argue there’s something to that. It speaks to its age.

Howard Hawks’ late western Rio Bravo (58) drifts across the screen with an hugely pleasurable lack of urgency. The siege drama unfolds in long breaths, with many arrivals and departures, a slow-building romantic subplot, a musical detour, some elegantly choreographed wordless sequences and a wealth of character development extending out from the more boldly captivating shoot-outs. John Wayne’s Sheriff John T. Chance has to fend off a troupe of well-equipped adversaries who want to free his prisoner, and he only has the truly marvelous Dean Martin’s Dude, a boozer attempting recovery, and Walter Brennan’s Stumpy, a cantankerous old cripple, for deputies. Yet Chance never seems too worried. He’s John Wayne, and this a movie about tough men who don’t apologize, men rendered vulnerable yet incapable of self-pity. The old cliché about courage under fire is embodied here with elegance and depth.

John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (76), which was remade a few years back and has recently been reissued in a special edition, is itself a remake. Its roots are not as obvious as Last House on the Left’s, but Carpenter’s sense of indebtedness is made clear from the outset, when the opening credits inform us the editor is someone named John T. Chance. The reconfiguring is more radical, with Rio Bravo's sleepy Texas town traded in for a Los Angeles ghetto, the band of outlaws replaced by what seems like an army of suicidally determined gang-bangers, and, most importantly, Hawk’s relaxed amble is forgone in favour of tautness and severity. Assault is a clipped, decidedly unfussy action movie, which also makes direct nods to Sam Fuller—the child killing—and Akira Kurosawa—the silent waves of baddies closing in—while cementing Carpenter’s particular directorial voice. It’s pretty terrific.

There are goofy, low-rent cop show aspects to Assault you’d never associate with a studio-backed, star-studded class-act like Rio Bravo: Carpenter’s ninja movie all-synth score, the Charlie’s Angels-like cutaways to a plastic speaker during a radio conversation, the sometimes corny lines, ie: “There are no heroes any more; only men who follow orders.” (That line, incidentally, comes from the speaker.) Yet collectively, these elements brim with modest charisma and quiet individuality, traits perfectly in keeping with Hawks’ men and women. And Carpenter’s insertion of a woman into the quartet of cornered, insufficiently armed protagonists who must hold their own against the urban ambush is inspired, simultaneously maintaining a tough-talking, Hawksian spin on heterosexual courtship and infusing their dialogue with an active, modern female presence. Overall, Assault will never be confused with the sort of classical majesty of Rio Bravo, but it’s exemplary of another era and another approach to genre filmmaking, a paragon for anyone trying to breath new life into an old idea.