Cult: Annual Edition by adobeprincess

CULT

The Definitive Movie Guide First Annual Edition

CONTENTS

INTERGALACTIC 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 The Man Who Fell to Ear th, 1976 E.T. the Extra-Ter restr ial, 1982 Blade Runner, 1982

12 18 22 24

MIDNIGHT MOVIES The Rocky Hor ror Picture Show, 1975 Eraserhead, 1977 The Room, 2003

30 34 38

LOCK THE DOOR Pyscho, 1960 Night of the Living Dead, 1968 Jaws, 1975 The Evil Dead, 1981

44 50 60 66

HIGH SCHOOL FOREVER Heathers, 1989 Dazed and Confused, 1993 Mean Girls, 2003

72 74 78

MAKES YOU THINK A Clockwork Orange, 1971 Fight Club, 1999 Donnie Darko, 2001

84 92 96

DARK COMEDY Dr. Strangelove, 1964 The Big Lebowski, 1998

102 106

DOCUMENTARY

110

Grey Gardens, 1975

Mainstream Cinema vs. Cult The Case for Success Incubators

Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, 2010, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Pulp Fiction, Boondock Saints, The Machinist, Kill Bill, Fight Club, 300, Eyes Wide Shut, Moon, and now Sucker Punch. What do these movies have in common? I’ll tell you: People either love them or hate them. Though some of them achieved mainstream status (in some cases years after their initial run at the box office), many failed to find as broad an audience when they first released. This, compared to sure-fire blockbuster movies like Transformers, Spiderman 2, Shrek 3, Terminator 4, or Fast 5 (the fifth installment of the Fast & the Furious franchise) which have come to be the new model of success for Hollywood: Franchises safely bring in the numbers, even if they often turn once original ideas into hollow shells of creeping mediocrity. The truth though, and the numbers don’t lie, is that “simple” is safe. Franchises work. Line up the remakes, sequels and mashups. They mean box office gold. How many Marvel and DC comic book superheroes are headlining movie studio franchises these days? Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Thor, Captain America, The X-Men and Wolverine, Jonah Hex, Ironman, Hulk, Green lantern, Daredevil, The Losers… The list keeps growing. Transformers and G.I. Joe didn’t escape the great 21st century rehash of pop culture childhood icons. Charlie’s Angels, Starsky & Hutch, The A-Team, Mission Impossible, Green Hornet, and scores of other popular “classic” TV series are being given the same red carpet treatment in Hollywood, and for obvious reasons: Familiar titles sell. Ask anyone associated with the Harry Potter universe. Or Shrek. Or Star Wars. Or Toy Story. In fact ask any movie producer today how much easier it is to get your sequel funded, versus getting a yet unproven original idea funded. The reality of most businesses is that money talks. Return on investment, for better and for worst, usually trumps creative or UX considerations when it comes to funding a project. There is an accepted success model in every industry – something many of us who try to push organizations beyond their comfort zones and break through stagnation refer to as the status-quo. That ROI should be a key factor (and often the central factor) in business funding decisions isn’t the problem. The problem is an often blind belief in “the safe bet.” The accepted model. The brainless PG13 sequel to the blockbuster or the formulaic movie adaptation of the comic book, complete with merchandising deals. This at the expense of relevance and long term survival. (Ergo: Long term profitability.) Using the movie industry as a platform, we can make the case that neither studios, directors nor actors can be successful if they focus solely on creating game-changing films or solely on contributing to endless tepid franchise vehicles. Success in the film industry (as with every other industry) comes from being able to balance both. Too much of the same thing pigeonholes you as either a corporate sellout or a fringe indie eccentric. If you are Daniel Craig, you can get away with filming

Bond film after Bond film, only if you also regularly work on projects like Layer Cake and Flashbacks of a Fool. If you are Johnny Depp, you can’t build a career on The Libertine, From Hell, and Chocolat without also signing up for Alice in Wonderland and Pirates of the Caribbean. Steve Jobs could have decided to stick to his franchise: Computers and software. Instead, he gambled on iPod, iPhone and iPad, and it paid off. JJ Abrams could have stuck to television, but he didn’t. The result: Almost cult-like excitement for every new big screen project he produces. (Super 8 comes out soon.) Steven Pressfield, in deciding to follow The Legend of Bagger Vance (a book about golf) with Gates of Fire, a historical epic about Spartans at Thermopylae, went against the grain, against the accepted model of success in the publishing world: He jumped categories. The gamble paid off, but at the time, industry professionals cautioned him against the move – which they saw as… ill advised. The lesson here is that success isn’t just a question of repetition. Success is a process of opportunity creation through experimentation. Before you can have a franchise, you have to give yourself the chance to either buy or create a basis for that franchise. Buying it is expensive and limiting. Creating it is riskier, but the payoffs are immeasurable. Planting the seeds of mainstream success: Investing in success incubators. There is nothing wrong with mainstream success, whether it is in the world of movies, TV shows, books, music, games, cars, clothes or electronics. Not every movie needs to change our souls or blow our socks off. Even dumb sequels with mildly entertaining jokes have their place, especially given their role in the cycle of profitability – which makes bolder experimental projects possible: Big successes mean big profits, big profits fuel big budgets, and big budgets often allow for experimental projects and products to be funded. Experimental projects are, to put it simply, talent and technology labs. More to the point, they are success incubators. As such, they don’t usually exist on the same plane as deliberate blockbuster efforts, nor should they be expected to. Let’s not forget that before Shrek became a franchise, it too was an experimental concept. An original idea. A gamble. Even within the world of commercial success, different types of products can yield wildly different types of results. Movies with niche audiences also have their place, not only as talent incubators but as gateway products for narrow (and deep) market bandwidths more interested in quality and nuance than quantity and noise. Tom Ford’s A Single Man was an outstanding film (especially for a first time director) but it could not be expected to experience the same kind of success (sales volume) as Sex And The City, for example, or even Ironman 2. Yet judging by the sudden appearance of tightly tailored suits and Michael Caine-like glasses on the red carpet following the release of the movie, it not only impressed its audience but even impacted the way men began to dress and accessorize after seeing it. Compare Colin Firth’s look in the movie with Sam Worthington’s choice of eyewear at the Oscars just a few

months later, where Ford’s movie was nominated for several Academy Awards. Uncanny, isn’t it? Sometimes, the impact of a movie or product – its value to the company taking a financial risk to create it – transcends the cash register. As a movie producer or a CEO, you sometimes have to see beyond the immediacy of sales. You have to take a step back and not only see the entire field, but make sure you allow yourself to see the bigger field. Yet the low hanging fruit usually wins: Pitch the next Batman sequel against an completely original script which has no basis in popular literature or existing franchises, and the outcome of box office sales is pretty much a foregone conclusion: The familiar blockbuster franchise will almost always win. Hollywood producers know this. Distribution companies know it too. And so do movie theater operators. Historically speaking, Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg and Chris Nolan come to the table with a much stronger sales pitch than, say, David Fincher, Zack Snyder and even Quentin Tarantino, which is why the former’s movies typically find their way to the most coveted summer release dates, while the latters’ films often see themselves released in the fall, winter and spring rather than just in time for 4th of July weekend. I won’t even get into the difference in same theater screen percentages between a Michael Bay release and a David Fincher release. Art films and so-called “foreign films” (like The King’s Speech) notwithstanding, there is a world of difference between franchise-driven blockbusters and courageous gambles on “concept” movies that aim to provide a certain portion of the movie-going populace with something more original than the usual fare. Directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Copolla, Stanley Kubrick, and even Luc Besson (back when he still made good movies) have given us cult classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, ET, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Terminator, Avatar, The Fifth Element, Psycho, North By Northwest, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Nikita. It is worth mentioning that Besson’s Nikita, which inspired an American remake and two separate TV series, still churns out revenue two decades after reinventing a genre on the big screen. The technical aesthetic of Kubrick’s 2001 still influences set design for sci-fi movies to this day, and will probably continue to do so for decades to come. Like most of Spielberg’s work, many of Cameron’s movies were enormous box office hits in spite of the fact that they were not extensions of existing franchises. Tarantino, for his part, has built his entire career on making completely original films… even though each set piece is an homage to not particularly original motifs deeply rooted into our pop culture consciousness. Before these guys became the big names of mainstream cinema, they were revolutionary film makers. Rule breakers. Rebels. They were the wild cards of their respective studios. If mainstream success grows out of cult projects, why does funding rarely fund success incubators? When Tim Burton Chris Nolan and David Fincher aren’t taking the reins of sure studio bets like Sleepy Hollow, Alice

in Wonderland, Batman or an Alien sequel, they give us completely original movies like Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mars Attacks, Memento, The Prestige, Seven, and Fight Club. Copolla, Kubrick, Besson, Hitchcock and Spielberg are still, to this day, some of the most influential movie directors of all time, and some of their most celebrated movies were not necessarily their biggest box office successes. Burton, Nolan, Fincher and Tarantino are among the next batch of directors future generations of movie-makers will spend endless hours studying and emulating. What is important to note is that they are not influential because they have huge box office successes under their belts. That came later. They are influential because they either reinvented genres or created entirely new narratives.

INTERGALACTIC

2001: A Space Odyssey

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Stanley Kubr ick Stanley Kubr ick Stanley Kubr ick, Ar thur C. Clarke Apr il 2, 1968 142 minutes $10.5–12 million $138–190 million

When director Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, there was much eulogizing from all corners of the film world. Many critics referred to the deceased by first name, as though “Stanley,” that legendarily reclusive filmmaker, were as familiar and known to them as a kindly old man they might happen to bump into now and then at the corner store. Perhaps it was Kubrick’s long and storied career, a livelihood producing great movies poured over by consecutive generations of filmgoers, which occasioned such informality. After all, here was a self-taught kid from the Bronx who broke into the pictures and, through sheer ingenuity and vision, changed the way the world saw film. In any case, Kubrick’s legacy is undeniable and he has clearly become part of the film canon. The most recent installment of Sight and Sound’s famous Top 10 poll (taken in 2002) ranked Kubrick as the #6 top director of all time as chosen by critics, and the #5 top director as chosen by other directors. Likewise, his films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) ranked highly on the polls of Top 10 films of all time, as chosen by critics and directors respectively. In these polls, Kubrick shares a lofty place in the pantheon with such fellow auteurs as Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles— but unlike most of those other directors (excluding Hitchcock), Kubrick remains more of a household name. Even in death, he still carries more cultural currency than many of his contemporaries, not only a reputation in the academy and the industry but also in the general public.

modes and genres of films typically considered untouchable by either a) “the mainstream” or b) “cultural elites”: two hazily defined conceptualizations to which the figure of the cultist is often posited and constructed in an oppositional, subcultural stance. It is in this light that I wish to look at Stanley Kubrick as an example of a filmmaker in whom auteurism and cultism are interrelated. I am not trying to claim him as a “cult auteur” in any sense, for it is certainly difficult to imagine Kubrick’s art film reputation mingling with the likes of John Waters, Jess Franco, or Ed Wood. Indeed, with the notable exception (and counterexample) of A Clockwork Orange (1971), none of his films are widely regarded as “cult” objects. Rather, Kubrick interests me precisely because, like Hitchcock, he is such a canonical director in the “high” auteur tradition, greatly regarded by cultural elites and casual (even “mainstream”) film buffs alike. However, in Kubrick there are clearer parallels between the phenomenon of cult movie celebration and the “cult” of personality surrounding his role as auteur. Auteur criticism seems to be the legitimate, academic side of the “cult” appreciation of a given director, taking artfulness for granted in the very term “auteur” (as opposed to the much more recent concept of a “cult auteur,” such as Ed Wood, who might create rather artless exploitation films that still bear a distinct authorial stamp). Cult film scholars have alluded to the connections between cultism and auteurism as different but related reading strategies for films. Sconce compares the cultist’s film consumption to the cineaste’s film consumption, both sharing a perceived opposition to mainstream Hollywood productions; likewise, the cultist uses sophisticated reading strategies similar to the cineaste’s interpretation of an auteur’s stylistic innovations. More recently, Sconce notes:

Kubrick has become a fast favorite of budding film buffs and aspiring art house patrons. Ask a young (often male) or otherwise somewhat inexperienced film buff for his/her favorite directors and Kubrick is almost assured to make the list at some stage in his/her cinematic education. As a young film buff ’s knowledge of cinema gradually widens, auteurism proves a seductive line of thought that enables one to organize one’s developing cinematic tastes around whole bodies of work made by individual filmmakers, instead of simply individual favorite films. With auteur theory’s privileging of the director generally incorporated into popular mainstream thought as a means of reading films as texts (perhaps the first “academic” reading strategy acquired by young film buffs), “Kubrick” as both preeminent auteur and canonical body of work provides a site of ready access for students and film buffs aspiring to upward cultural and academic mobility. Despite its inherent shortcomings and the challenges to it by feminism and poststructuralism, auteurism remains a strong structuring force in film studies, providing varying degrees of readability for “high” art texts; for example, some auteurs’ bodies of work are less readable than others, often by virtue of their “foreignness” or lesser availability to “the masses,” thus helping to establish a cultural hierarchy in which high-brow cineastes foster elitism.

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“What is often dismissed in [cult film’s white, middle-class, male] audience as pointless obsession, however, is a close analogue to the work of legitimate film scholars…. […] If ‘cult’ audiences mimic film scholars, film scholarship is not unlike a cult.”

Indeed, Hawkins notes how auteur theory grew out of the cultish celebration by white, middle-class, male critics at Cahiers du cinéma (several of whom famously became the vanguard of the “high art” French New Wave) of various B-movie and genre directors like Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, and Nicolas Ray (directors who represented an alternative to commercialized Hollywood productions). She describes how “MacMahonism” informed the Cahiers auteurist debates with “a macho, heroic film aesthetic that drew equally from high and low culture. ” Auteur theory of the 1950’s and 1960’s was in many ways a sort of “fan-boy’s club,” a school of thought at odds with the feminizing effects of “mainstream” Hollywood culture, yet leveling certain high and low films as equals within the same critical plane in the process of cultish adulation. Auteurist and cultist reading strategies both share the same insistence

Meanwhile, cult movie criticism has emerged in recent years as almost a form of “reverse elitism” celebrating

on reading films for special aspects perhaps not noticeable by the uninitiated (no matter whether that “uninitiated” be construed as mainstream commercial moviegoers or viewers on either side of the supposed “high/low” cultural divide)— and of course, the continuing influence of auteurism has informed the criticism of both art cinema and cult cinema.

that roughly falls into popular, traditionally profitable genres. While some subject matter came from popular fiction (e.g., Stephen King, Peter George), some of Kubrick’s source material descended from “high” literary canons (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Makepeace Thackeray), thus adding a further degree of artistic repute to the resulting filmic adaptations—though the case of A Clockwork Orange shows that material of a “high” literary pedigree can still result in a definitive “cult” work.

Beneath the glossy veneer of artiness (which critics usually emphasize to help elevate, and thus distance, an auteur’s films from that of “common” genre directors), Kubrick’s films generally fall into the classifications of popular genre, especially genres that have traditionally been associated with male-oriented, “low,” or B-movie productions. For future reference, a listing of his 13 films, accompanied by my genre classifications for each, should make this more readily viewable: ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ×× ××

Of considerable interest in auteur criticism is the personal life of the director authoring the text, a life informing films with his/her unique sensibility, and Kubrick’s legacy as it exists today provides a notable example. The “cult of personality” formed by auteurism builds legends around filmmakers, especially those whose living and working methods are marked by eccentricity, such as Lars Von Trier, Werner Herzog, and David Lynch. Legends about Kubrick’s meticulous and pain-staking preproduction research, his penchant for repeated takes and sheer perfectionism while filming and editing, and various obsessive aspects of his personal life (e.g. fear of flying, permanent residency in England, etc.) have sprung up around the man and his work, creating him into a sort of mythic figure. A connection can be drawn here between auteur theory and cultism, for both highly value trivia as a means of providing “a sense of inclusion through shared knowledge” that is also used “to exclude outsiders.” Just as cultists use trivia to inform reading strategies and exert a purported sense of ownership over the revered material, the auteurist critic uses intimate and highly detailed knowledge of the director’s personal life and prior work in order to inform auteurist reading strategies and to assert a film’s academic or high cultural value as an artistic text that rises above “mainstream” tastes or fosters such reading strategies. Likewise, both cultists and auteurist critics use “critical distance” to distinguish themselves as more discerning than mass market viewers, thus privileging some reading strategies over others, especially when the cult/auteur object is also widely popular within “mainstream” consumption (as in Kubrick’s films, for example).

Fear and Desire 1953, war Killer’s Kiss 1955, film noir The Killing 1956, film noir Paths of Glory 1957, war Spartacus 1960, sword & sandal epic, war Lolita 1962, black comedy, romantic melodrama Dr. Strangelove 1964, black comedy, war 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968, science-fiction A Clockwork Orange 1971, science-fiction, black comedy Barry Lyndon 1975, costume drama The Shining 1980, horror Full Metal Jacket 1987, war Eyes Wide Shut 1999, psychosexual melodrama

The obvious artistry of Kubrick’s films tends to raise their cultural status from being mere genre pictures to being the artful products of an auteur, especially after the time of Kubrick’s formulation as an auteur in the early 1960’s (as I shall elaborate upon shortly). Auteur status automatically confers a certain artistry upon a director, especially one able to raise “low” genres and make them palatable to those with higher cultural tastes. Of course, this is not to say that all of Kubrick’s films were received favorably by either mainstream moviegoers, academics, or elite cineastes; many of his films garnered mixed reviews from both “low” and “high” audiences. However, Kubrick’s films mixed low/mass and high/art in ways that made his films relatively popular to most viewers. Like many art film auteurs, Kubrick’s films were produced outside of the Hollywood system (not to mention, geographically in England since 1962’s Lolita) and exhibit various artistic traits alternately familiar and challenging to mainstream American audiences accustomed to Hollywood products; however, unlike most art film auteurs (even other American ones like David Lynch), most of Kubrick’s films were financed and widely distributed by major Hollywood studios, as likely to be shown in mainstream cinemas as to be shown in art houses. Kubrick’s crossover success between both mainstream audiences and art house elites speaks to the fact that many of his films were both strong artistic and financial achievements upon their release, no doubt inspired by Kubrick’s choice of subject matter

In the case of Kubrick specifically, the figure of him as a hermetic, idiosyncratic auteur bodes well for a sort of cultist/auteurist conflation. By remaining intensely private and secretive on the fringes of an industry built upon public exposure, the notion of Kubrickas-auteur fostered a “cult of personality” by his very refusal to exploit the limelight occupied more comfortably by other prominent directors (e.g. compare Kubrick to Hitchcock’s rampant showmanship and self-aggrandizement). This hermeticism encourages auteurist readings that border especially strongly on cult because the auteurist critic must “gain access” to the filmmaker’s private world — a world not unlike the hermetic, border-policed world of the cultist—using the sort of detailed cross-textual knowledge (and/or trivia) of Kubrick’s work necessary for an auteurist reading. Likewise, the infrequency with which

Kubrick produced films — only 13 in almost 50 years of filmmaking, with lengthening intervals between films in his late career (e.g. 12 years between 1987’s Full Metal Jacket and 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut)—adds to an almost cultish critical overinvestment in each release. In a broader sense, this sort of critical (over) investment also leads to repeat consumption of an auteur’s films under the lofty stance of “artworthiness,” a reading/consumption strategy resembling the repeat consumption of cult films by fans similarly attuned to the textual/profilmic practices and eccentricities of their less reputable object choices.

as part of a double feature like many other films noirs and B-movies. Although this type of nonlinear structure would eventually become a trademark of art cinema, it was apparently not enough to raise a film noir like The Killing to “high” enough cultural status for it to play in the art houses. Nevertheless, Kubrick’s “auteur” methods and critical status were beginning to mount; from this point on, Kubrick’s control over his films (Spartacus excepted) from the writing stage to the directing was more pronounced, although he was not yet also in charge of the distribution and theatre booking of his films, as he would be in his later career.

A brief glance at each of Kubrick’s films should hopefully help to draw some parallels between cultist and auteurist object choices. Fear and Desire (1953), Kubrick’s low-budget independently produced first feature, tells an existential tale about soldiers fighting behind enemy lines in an unnamed war that causes them to lose their sanity and humanity. Along with Spartacus (1960), this was Kubrick’s only film on which he received no screenwriting credit, yet for all of its weaknesses as a rather amateur debut film, it shares thematic resonances with many of his later films — most notably in its evocation of the dehumanizing effects of violence and war. According to biographer Vincent LoBrutto, the film played the art house circuit to mixed reviews before, notably enough, being billed “as a sexploitation picture.” Kubrick soon withdrew all prints of it from public exhibition and it was very rarely seen for decades. As LoBrutto says, “Cultists and Kubrick fanatics saw it as a cinematic equivalent of the Rosetta Stone or the Shroud of Turin,” due to its utter unavailability. Although extremely difficult to find, there are very poor quality bootlegs of the film circulating within the same paracinematic video trade/sales circles that many hard-to-find, semi-legal cult films call home. In this sense, Fear and Desire exists today as a sort of “lost object” invested with great desire by Kubrick cultists, a prize obtainable by only the hardcore few who use the same illicit, underground sources utilized by other cult consumers.

Kubrick’s reputation as a skillful perfectionist and talented up-and-coming auteur grew with his next film, Paths of Glory (1957). His first studio film with a major star, it featured Kirk Douglas as a French general who tries unsuccessfully to save three men from execution for cowardice following a blundered attack in the trenches of World War I. Another film about the dehumanizing effects of war, not to mention a harsh condemnation of military corruption and wrongdoing — themes to which he would return in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket—it was a critical success. It was also Kubrick’s first film to be shot outside of the United States (in Germany). Douglas then brought in Kubrick as a last-minute replacement for director Anthony Mann on his sprawling big-budget sword & sandal epic Spartacus several years later. Centering on the failed slave rebellion led by the titular gladiator, the resulting film was a lackluster example of a cycle that was nearing the end of its course in Hollywood. Although it earned several awards and a respectable box-office return (despite controversy about the source novel and screenplay being written by two blacklisted writers), Kubrick was not pleased with the production process as essentially a director-for-hire and in later years semi-disowned the film. As LoBrutto states, ××

Killer’s Kiss (1955) was Kubrick’s second low-budget independent feature, and his first foray into the film noir style/genre still in its heyday at the time, despite being a “low” B-movie genre. This time out, Kubrick wrote the film, in addition to photographing, editing, and directing it. The story of a boxer dragged into violence as he attempts to protect a dancer from a vengeful nightclub owner, Killer’s Kiss was inspired by Kubrick’s first short documentary film, Day of the Fight (1951). Kubrick’s next project was his first Hollywood studio feature, The Killing (1956), another film noir that is often considered his first “professional” picture. It helped pioneer a radically nonlinear narrative structure by using intersecting flashbacks to show the details of a racetrack robbery gone wrong and a getaway thwarted by cruel chance. According to LoBrutto, this nonlinear structure was rather confusing to audiences at the time and the film was neither a critical nor financial success; instead of showing in art houses (as Kubrick intended), it played

“The supreme lesson that Stanley Kubrick learned on Spartacus was that he had to have autonomy on the films he directed,” and Kubrick later noted that Spartacus was the only film on which he did not have “absolute control.”

Lolita (1962) was Kubrick’s first production to be surrounded by widespread controversy, due to Nabokov’s notorious seriocomic story of a middle-aged professor who becomes tragically infatuated with a pre-teen “nymphet.” With the announced production mired in scandal from the get-go, Kubrick decided to move shooting to England to help avoid high production costs and censorship restrictions, and he would subsequently shoot the rest of his films in England as well. Many compromises with various censorship boards were necessary to secure the film a seal of approval for distribution, but Lolita was finally okayed, opening to positive reviews and solid box-office returns. Although Lolita is not generally considered a cult movie in any respect (possibly in part because its risqué subject matter always remains at the level of innuendo and mild suggestion, never explicitly employing “low” or

exploitative appeals to the viewer’s body), the very controversy itself shares parallels between cultism and auteurism. In his discussion of David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Mathijs notes how “topicality and controversy are crucial mechanisms in the creation of cult in critical reception,” serving to help form or bolster a director’s auteur status. Controversy and topicality— which often go hand-in-hand when a film calls into question the changing nature of cultural values. As some critics attempt to reappraise a scandalous film in this context, auteurist readings may result through the linking of the film’s controversial aspects to the question of directorial intent, thus helping to critically reinterpret the film as more “worthy” than it might not otherwise seem at first glance. While there appears to be a world of difference between Kubrick’s “high” literary adaptation (pre-privileged for serious critical consideration) and Cronenberg’s “low” body horror debut (pre-prejudiced for serious critical dismissal), the reception of each film respectively shares a critical tendency toward auteurist readings that help to dispel the threat of potentially “pornographic,” exploitative subject matter in each. Just as Cronenberg’s reputation as a budding auteur sprang from the controversy of his first feature film, I believe that Kubrick’s growing reputation as an auteur was much aided by his willingness to engage in controversial subject matter (e.g., as in his later films like A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut). After Lolita, Kubrick’s renown as an auteur seemed to be firmly established: virtually all of his subsequent films were advertised under the banner of his own name, the title of each film often preceded by the “Stanley Kubrick’s” ownership tag (e.g.“Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange” or “Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove”), as if actively using his “absolute control” as auteur as a marketing strategy unto itself.

seems to preclude its being taken as a cult object, and vice-versa; “cult” is automatically associated with “low” objects, even if cult is just as select a culturally imposed categorization as the “high” art revered by cineastes. Dr. Strangelove, like Eco’s example of the highly regarded Casablanca, provides a case in which low/cult and high/art appreciations of the same film are not mutually exclusive, even if each categorization is often used in opposition to the other. In this way, auteurism and cultism can share similar cultural self-exclusionary tactics, even if their reading strategies are remarkably alike, finding value in the very same aspects of a given film. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was Kubrick’s first science-fiction film, and is generally considered a very influential benchmark effort, not only of the genre but of cinema in general. Adapted from a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most highly esteemed science-fiction writers, the film traced the simian ancestry of man back to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence during prehistory— then leapt forward in time to the titular year as man-made computer technology takes over a spaceship amid an exploratory expedition to Jupiter. The film ends with the sole surviving astronaut fleeing the ship in an escape pod, being sucked through a Star Gate, and emerging in an alien environment where he ages rapidly before apparently being reborn as an evolutionarily advanced Starchild orbiting Earth. The open-ended, highly symbolic narrative of the film has much in common with other radical narratological developments in 1960’s art cinema, and despite some understandable public confusion and discussion over what the film ultimately meant, it became regarded as the first “serious” science-fiction picture; its most direct cinematic descendant in narrative form and genre is Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Hailed as an artistic and technological triumph, 2001: A Space Odyssey helped bring an air of respectability to the genre. According to LoBrutto, Kubrick had prepared for the production by viewing any and all science-fiction films he could acquire, even ones of the lowest quality, in his search for new ideas — though he would not do likewise in his preparation to enter the horror genre with The Shining (1980). Kubrick himself helped to distinguish his film from the “low” associations that science-fiction films had garnered since the youth craze of the 1950’s:

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) marked another Kubrick incursion into comedic territory, again using a fairly serious novel (Peter George’s Red Alert) as inspiration for a satire. The result was one of his most popularly enduring films, a perversely razor-edged black comedy about the very real threat of global nuclear annihilation; in more recent years, Kubrick’s vision of power-mad politicians and military men has been validated as being much closer to the truth than even the filmmakers themselves knew at the time. As Eco notes, a cult movie must “provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes,” and Dr. Strangelove seems to fall into this category. It is Kubrick’s first immensely quotable film and its shadowy netherworld of government war rooms, hovering bombers, and besieged military bases denotes a sort of eerily familiar, yet satirically sent-up Cold Warring world. Were the film not so highly celebrated by both cineastes and moviegoers (both at the time of its release and today), its subversively sardonic take on the global nuclear politics of its day would no doubt heighten its status as a cult object due to the sheer perversity of its subject matter. A film’s inclusion in the canons of “high art” often

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“I don’t regard 2001 simply as science fiction,” he told Newsweek. “Science fiction is a legitimate field, of course. But there has been bad execution of the visual effects and too much emphasis on monsters. 2001 is not fantasy, though a portion of it is speculative.”

Although Kubrick (and critics supporting the film) seemed all too ready to distance 2001: A Space Odyssey from the fantasy, monsters, and bad visual effects found in the less reputable science-fiction films of the 1950’s and 1960’s which are now consumed primarily by a cult audience, his own film drew a

strong cult audience of its own. Billed as “the ultimate trip,” 2001: A Space Odyssey was very popular with the 1960’s youth generation, frequented by hippies and other counterculture members eager to enhance their drug trips with the hallucinatory trip through the Star Gate depicted in the film. In his pioneering survey of “subversive” films, Vogel describes 2001 as a: ××

or as laddishly opposed to the feminism of political correctness. Although mass culture consumption is generally coded as “feminine” in a patriarchal society, less remarked upon by cult film theorists is the strong reverse element of feminization that is often associated with “high” art; from the perspective of the lower classes (i.e. when working-class males are traditionally associated with an aggressive, over-sexualized masculinity), “high” art is often seen as rather foreign and bourgeois/elite, typically less visceral and direct, somewhat unmanly and effete (hence the tellingly derogatory epithet “art fag” occasionally applied to high art elites). Read notes how the male cultist’s identification with the male director-as-auteur allows him to fight the common connotations of cultists as “nerdish,” desexualized fan-boys and feminized mass market consumers; by actively and discriminatingly choosing their cult objects (as opposed to vainly consuming, as is supposedly the case in feminine mass market consumption) and exercising a degree of supposed control over the texts through detailed knowledge/trivia of the auteur, male cultists make a “masculine” claim over their cultdom. In the case of Kubrick-as-auteur, his use of certain genres and subject matter (often associated with low, male-oriented, and body-affecting material that is far from feminism’s various definitions of political correctness) in combination with the major studio (semi- to fully-mainstream) distribution of his films, means that his work straddles mass tastes and elite tastes, its continuing cultural currency in each category of spectatorship allowing the young (male) film buff to retain ties to a low/mass audience and yet safely stretch his interests into high/elite circles (since “art” film credentials supposedly raise a film above “mainstream” consumption) without the risk of snobbery or the potential guilt of leaving one’s previous economic/cultural level. The figure of Kubrick-as-auteur thus allows “cultists and Kubrick fanatics,” including the young (male) film buff, to indulge in (primarily) male-oriented art films that draw upon both high and low cultural elements and remain highly regarded by both low and high audiences, suspending those cultists in a transitional space where the apparently feminizing aspects of both low/ mass and high/elite cultures comfortably cancel each other out, leaving Kubrick’s cultish auteurdom as an ostensibly unproblematic and ultimately accessible site of interest for the aspiring young (male) film buff or academic-in-training. Of course, this same sort of argument can be equally extended to other auteurs (both “high” and “low”) beyond Stanley Kubrick, but I have hopefully pointed toward a source for increased critical work on the intersection between cultism and auteurism, two overlapping reading/consumption strategies that have coexisted uneasily for far too long.

“Cult film of the young, this is a manifesto of the new sensibility; a nostalgic elegy to innocence lost to technology, a vision of truths beyond understanding. It ends with unforgettable images of the new star child in space, facing the earth he must transform to make it human again.”

Though Kubrick had not made the film specifically for the counterculture, nor intended it to portray or enhance a drug trip (as in a “head film”), it was nevertheless appropriated by a strong countercultural cult audience, the same demographic that helped bridge the “high” art cinema of the 1960’s and the “low” midnight (cult) movie sensation of the 1970’s. Part science-fiction, part black comedy, A Clockwork Orange (1971) is the only Kubrick film to be widely regarded not only as an important art film, but also as a prime example of a cult film. With its dark humor, disturbingly graphic imagery, “retro-futuristic” visual style, synth-classical score, and the inventive “nadsat” slang taken from Anthony Burgess’s novel, there is much to suggest the film as a cult object, a special sort of (in Eco’s words) “completely furnished world” unto itself enabling the quotation of dialogue and situations. The near-futuristic story of a vicious teenage gang leader whose violent free will is stripped from him by an authoritarian society attempting his rehabilitation, A Clockwork Orange proved very popular with young audiences and much of its cult reputation springs from the notorious depictions of sex and violence that allegedly inspired “copycat” crimes (a controversy much like the one later surrounding Walter Hill’s 1979 cult movie The Warriors). One of the effects of cult film criticism has been this sort of repeated traversing of high/elite and low/mass cultural strata, academically placing cult film within the context of “high” film canons, whether by positing cult film in political opposition to elite canons or by incorporating cult film into aesthetic discussions of film form and cultural consumption. As Read points out, the male cult film critic is often caught between the position of A) the politically enlightened academic and B) the feminized, desexualized figure of the subcultural “fan-boy” who is at once opposed to the feminine associations of “mass” culture consumption and the political correctness (e.g., feminism) that would typically denounce the disreputable (body-affecting) pleasures of many cult films. The cult film critic, much like the young film buff negotiating high/low distinctions via the cultish celebration of an auteur like Kubrick, thus cannot escape a position that is either viewed as feminized and disempowered

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget

Nicolas Roeg Michael Deeley, Bar r y Spikings Paul Mayer sberg The Man Who Fell to Ear th by Walter Tevis March 18, 1976 138 minutes $1.5 million

There is some validity to the seemingly wild notion that The Wizard of Oz (1939), with its journey into a mysterious world, fantasy elements, and homesickness theme, has influenced the majority of pictures made since. In fact, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) is The Wizard of Oz in reverse: instead of having one of us (Dorothy) travel to an alien environment where three friendly inhabitants (the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion) facilitate a desired return home, a peaceful alien (E.T.) visits our world and three of us (the three children) help it find a way back home. Likewise, in the flawed yet fascinating The Man Who Fell to Earth, peaceful alien Thomas Jerome Newton becomes stranded on our planet and three earthlings (Farnsworth, Mary-Lou, and Bryce) try to help him accomplish his plan, which, although they don’t fully realize it, is to build a spaceship capable of traveling to his planet. But The Wizard of Oz (the film, not L. Frank Baum’s somewhat gloomy book) and E.T. are modern fairy tales in the sense that they provide children with the happy, consoling endings they have become accustomed to. Like Terry Gilliam’s Oz-influenced Time Bandits (1981), The Man Who Fell to Earth is an old-fashioned fairy tale for those adults who read Jonathan Swift and believe that our world, and those who run it, can be cold, cruel, and unfair. And it’s a fairy tale for those kids who still read those surprisingly morbid Grimm stories about characters who fall from grace (Newton’s “fall” to earth signifies his descent into purgatory) and are punished (how Newton suffers). Unlike in the Grimm stories, he does not repent and receive salvation—Newton chooses to wallow in self-pity rather than come to terms with his own fallibility and with the other reasons his mission fails, so he dooms himself to eternal damnation. Tragically, Newton can never go home: his three friends aren’t as comforting or resourceful as Dorothy’s and E.T.’s, and his own homeward drive is far too weak for him to accomplish the near impossible.

shuttle system, or return to get his family? Adding to the confusion rather than clearing it up, Roeg has told interviewers that there is a possibility that the Newton of the film is no spaceman at all, but a reclusive Howard Hughes type who hallucinates what it would be like if he came from a waterless planet to earth. (The building of the spaceship is certainly the next step for the man who built The Spruce Goose, the world’s largest plane. That project also failed.) True, many shots in the film, including those of Newton’s thirsty family on his barren planet and that of the American pioneers who spot Newton’s limo through what seems to be a time warp, could be visions of an hallucinating genius. But we can’t so easily dismiss the scene in which Newton reverts to his alien form to jolt Mary-Lou into seeking a more suitable lover. (Just as civilized white teenager Jenny Agutter rejects aborigine David Gumpilil, who is alien to her, in Roeg’s 1971 masterpiece Walkabout, Mary-Lou finds she can’t make love to Newton when he is in his alien form.) This sequence proves to my satisfaction that Newton is not from our planet. Unfortunately, Roeg neglects its other purpose: in the book, when Newton looked at his Anthean form in the mirror, “his own body stared back at him but he could not recognize it as his own.” This moment is pivotal because it is when Newton should realize, and be terrified as a result, that in his mind he has indeed become an imitation human being. (He is like those Indian tribesmen of the New World who forgot their own languages after explorers took them for lengthy visits to Europe.) As in other Roeg films —Walkabout, Performance (1970), Don’t Look Now (1973), Bad Timing (1980), Eureka (1983)—we have a character who finds himself in a completely strange environment/situation. (By casting singers like Mick Jagger, Art Garfunkel, and David Bowie, Roeg figured their discomfort from moving from the stage to the screen would transfer to their characters.) The cultural collision causes the character to grope for parts of himself that have been latent, so that he might survive. As a result, he is able to formulate a more accurate self-definition. Invariably, the character learns truths about himself that cause disillusionment and disappointment. For instance, the civilized girl in Walkabout becomes scared when her primitive sexual instincts are revealed; and the macho gangster Chas (James Fox) in Performance is unhappy to learn that he has homosexual tendencies. Like Swift’s Gulliver in the land of the tiny Lilliputians, Newton, though kindly, thinks the intellectually inferior earthlings to be no more than a race of chimpanzees, or (as he states in the book) insects. He is sure that after studying them for fifteen years on television he knows all about them. But, he discovers, “the strange thing about television is that it doesn’t tell you anything.” As time passes he finds himself being vacuumed into this human race instead of remaining above it, and becoming one of the “frightened, self-pitying hedonists.” As Tevis notes, Newton realizes that television perpetuates the “fantastic lie that America [is] a nation of God-fearing small towns, efficient cities, healthy farmers, kindly

Director Nicolas Roeg never spells out what Newton’s mission on earth is. Always one who attempts to turn his viewers into puzzle solvers (which explains his fragmentary editing style), Roeg intentionally did away with Walter Tevis’s explanation. In Tevis’s novel Newton was sent from distant Anthea to build a ship that will ferry Antheans from their dying planet back to earth. Once on earth, the Antheans intend to become dominant in business (setting up many World Enterprises divisions), politics, and the military, on an international scale. Just as viewers of Raoul Walsh’s bizarre satire The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) somehow root for angel Jack Benny to destroy our evil earth, readers of Tevis’s book desire an Anthean takeover because only then can we avoid a nuclear war: it’s an interesting concept. In the film, there is no mention of a specific planet called Anthea, nor must we consider a choice between colonization and nuclear destruction. We can’t even understand the purpose of Newton’s space vehicle: does he want to travel back to his planet with water, transport water via an elaborate

doctors, bemused housewives, philanthropic millionaires,” and he discovers “an aspect of strong and comfortable and hedonistic and unthinking humanity that his fifteen years of television watching had left him unaware of.” Even living in near seclusion, Newton becomes infected by the earthlings he feels superior to. Of course, one who suffers from an open wound called loneliness is not immune.

powerful forces (capitalist leaders, CIA, FBI) who fear he will put the world’s greatest monopolies out of business. A sense of melancholy pervades: Mary-Lou (well played by quirky Candy Clark) laments the disappearance of America’s trains; we hear nostalgic songs like “Try to Remember” and “Blue Bayou” on the soundtrack; we see those enterprising American pioneers embarking on building America. The impression we get is that Newton had come to earth too late, when the desensitized people of the nuclear age have forgotten their ancestors’ pioneering spirit and have settled for creature comforts like television, and have become, as a result of living in a capitalistic world, “Liars! Chauvinists! And Fools!” It is a world that the Newton of the novel fears bringing Antheans to because he worries they will be corrupted, as he has been; fittingly the American landscape Roeg shows us is at once beautiful and uninviting.

Farnsworth, who is a homosexual in the film, Bryce, who is divorced (he is a widower in the book), and Mary-Lou, who is an insignificant, unattached New Mexican hotel maid, are naturally attracted to Newton, another outsider. He gives meaning to their dreary lives. Lawyer Farnsworth (“I got a brand new life”) can enjoy taking on the big boys: Polaroid, Du Pont, IBM. Teacher Bryce, who had frittered his life away making it with coeds, can now satisfy his scientific curiosity by doing applied research in exciting, unexplored areas. A one-time nurse and the type who brings home birds with broken wings, Mary-Lou, who’s thrilled “to be part of a story,” has found the perfect lover to mother: someone who faints, has a bloody nose, and vomits within the first minute of their acquaintance. Unfortunately, none of Newton’s three friends can provide him with stimulation. While waiting for his ship to be constructed, he begins to see life as they once did, as being without meaning, without purpose. (Unlike Mary-Lou, he doesn’t believe in God.) Human pressures he doesn’t comprehend build up within him, and as Tevis writes, “he, the Anthean, a superior being from a superior race, was losing control, becoming a degenerate, a drunkard, a lost and foolish creature, a renegade, and, possibly, a traitor to his own.” A man in exile, a man without an island, he loses himself in sex with Mary-Lou (their relationship is platonic in the novel), booze, and television (he goes from one set to six to sixteen). His addiction to gin and television (“Stay out of my mind!” he screams at his blaring sets) is obviously symptomatic of his unhappiness and self-destructive nature. In his life with Mary-Lou, which starts out as romantic as Gary Cooper’s with Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon (1957), which they watch on TV, he becomes like the typical overburdened business executive. I believe that his domestication, as much as anything, leads to his drinking and guilty withdrawal—after all, he has a real wife and family elsewhere. In the Roeg-photographed Petulia (1968), Shirley Knight bakes cookies in an attempt to win back ex-husband George C. Scott and Scott hurls them through the air, signifying he doesn’t want to return to a dull, stifling marriage. Similarly, when Mary-Lou makes cookies for Newton, he knocks them in the air, signifying he can’t stand being the stereotypical American husband caught in a deteriorating marriage.

Peter O’Toole was set to be Newton at one time, but rock music idol David Bowie makes a better choice. Bowie, who would be the male lead in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), is fine playing pained, passive characters. As Newton he gives an appropriately subdued, sympathetic performance. With his orange hair, great height, and anemic look, Bowie does indeed seem like an alien. His birdlike features actually contribute to our empathy for Newton, who, unlike the muscular Atlas, must bear the weight of his world on shoulders that are brittle. We know what Newton must be feeling when on the soundtrack Eddy Arnold sings “Make the World Go Away (and Take It Off My Shoulders)”: Newton feels enormous guilt that he can’t carry out his mission, but his burden is too great; he doesn’t have a chance because on earth it is the strong, unfortunately, who survive.

Another reason Newton is depressed is because he was unprepared for the ruthlessness he finds on earth. A nice guy, with no weapons, who doesn’t dislike anyone—just like Billy Budd, whom he sees hanged on his TV screen—he cannot combat those

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Novelization by Stor y by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg , Kathleen Kennedy Melissa Mathison William Kotzwinkle Steven Spielberg June 11, 1982 117 minutes $10.5 million $792.9 million

E.T. the Extra Terrestrial may be one of the most personal blockbusters ever made. Inspired in part by director Steven Spielberg’s suburban upbringing and his parents’ divorce, the film tells the story of a suburban boy named Elliot, himself a child of divorced parents, who becomes the caretaker of a wise and gentle alien creature, stranded on Earth and desperate to find a way back to its home planet. It is the story of two lost souls, both longing for the comfort and security that only a true home and family can provide, who ultimately rescue each other through the power of love and friendship.

inspired tales of alien conquest which dominated much of the science fiction landscape in decades hence, it was Spielberg’s desire to bring the sense of wonder he felt while gazing at the stars as a child to the big screen. E.T. is portrayed as an intergalactic botanist, a vegetarian whose very touch can heal the wounded and bring dying plants back to life. The United States government agents are ostensibly the villains of the piece. Their cold detachment and treatment of E.T. as a specimen to be studied stands in stark contrast to Elliot’s own psychic link and emotional attachment to the creature. Spielberg has said that the story was partially inspired by federal cuts to the space program at the time during which the film was made, and it is a film very clearly designed to inspire awe in the universe that surrounds us. Decades later, Spielberg would go on to produce a more standard alien invasion scenario with his 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds, a film greatly inspired by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but it is E.T. The Extra Terrestrial that seems to best represent the director’s view of our place in the universe and the curiosity which has driven the human race to explore worlds beyond our own solar system.

With its small cast and domestic setting, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial practically seems like an independent feature, particularly in comparison to Steven Spielberg’s two previous films, the big budgeted, under-performing 1941 and the serial-inspired, smash-hit action adventure Raiders of the Lost Ark, a coproduction with Spielberg’s fellow blockbusterproducing wunderkind, George Lucas. Even Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which deals with similar themes related to mankind’s encounter with a peaceful alien intelligence, is a story told on a global scale. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial never leaves the confines of the suburban neighborhood in which it is set, centering much of the action in Elliot’s cluttered bedroom. Spielberg’s creative choice to position the camera from the point of view of the children in the film only adds to the intimate atmosphere. Even the film’s most sweeping cinematic moments, particularly Elliot and E.T.’s flight through the air on Elliot’s bicycle, which would go on to become one of the most iconic film sequences of the last forty years, possess a sense of innocent wonde that helps to distinguish the film from many of its louder and brasher contemporaries.

The story of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is not entirely unique, reminiscent as it is of countless Disney or Children’s Film Foundation films that precede it. Even screenwriter Melissa Mathison had covered similar territory with her adaptation three years earlier of Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion, a film which also explores the bond between a boy and a creature who must rely on one another for friendship and survival. It is Spielberg’s direction, the intimate lighting and photography, and the design of the creature itself that truly distinguishes E.T. The Extra Terrestrial from the standard Saturday morning fare.

Though it is a timeless story, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is also very much a product of its time, perfectly capturing the atmosphere of a suburban home and neighborhood in the early 1980s. From Elliot’s Star Wars figures to Gertie’s Speak & Spell, the snippet of an Elvis Costello song sung by older brother Michael, to the BMX bikes which allow the children to elude E.T.’s government captors, the film is filled with cultural signifiers of the time. Even the Reese’s Pieces which Elliot employs to lure E.T. into the house seem very much part and parcel with the era in which the film is set. As a child of the 1980s, and someone who spent hours in my own suburban backyard swinging a stick as though it were a lightsaber while my older brother endlessly rode his BMX bike in circles around our cul de sac, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial represented one of the first times that I recognized aspects of my own life in a cinematic story, which is likely why it still resonates so deeply with me as an adult.

Critical response to E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was incredibly favorable and the film would go on to earn the highest box office ratings of the 1980s, spawning both countless imitations and a wide array of merchandise, including an ill-fated Atari video game, the failure of which nearly bankrupted the company. Looking back, however, it becomes clear that the story of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is far too intimate to have inspired a thrilling video game adaptation. E.T. is simply a lost child, attempting to make it back home, a task that can only be accomplished through the love and friendship earned from Elliot and his family. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is a film that will long live in the hearts of those who see it, a story which serves as a reminder that it’s a small universe after all.

Another aspect which distinguishes E.T. The Extra Terrestrial from other alien “invasion” films dating back to the 1950s is the simple fact that the story’s alien being actually does “come in peace,” a trait the film shares with Spielberg’s earlier feature, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unlike the Cold War

Blade Runner

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget Box office

Ridley Scott Michael Deeley Hampton Fancher, David Peoples Do Android Dream of Electr ic Sheep? by Philip K. Dick June 25, 1982 117 minutes $28 million $33.8 million

In an interview published in Starlog (February 1982), he told James Van Hise:

Ridley Scott’s ambitious, $15 million adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? flopped with critics and was a box-office bust when first released, but it has since emerged as a cult favorite, midnight movie staple, and perhaps the first “thinking person’s science fiction film” since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Too often we hear people claim that a particular film improves on second viewing, but it’s definitely true with Blade Runner. On second viewing, the awesome visuals no longer overwhelm the story and themes, as critics had complained. Now we can understand that the visuals (particularly those that depict the city in the year 2019) help tell the story and advance the themes. While the slow pacing and Deckard’s noir-style narration were initially off-putting, we now realize they are essential for helping create the picture’s somber, melancholy, memories-lost ambience and, because Deckard sounds cheerier than his brooding character in his story (remember this is his flashback), for confirming Deckard has undergone a positive change since the action we witness took place. (His rosier attitude is the result of the action we witness.) And on second viewing we can take delight in the marvelous cast—what faces and bodies!—and their fascinating characters. Harrison Ford’s narration is weakly delivered, but he has strong screen presence; Sean Young will steal your heart; Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, and Joanna Cassidy are the cleverest, best-looking, and deadliest “bad guy” gang in recent memory.

××

“I still remember the one line he had in there: ‘We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.’ … [T]hat influenced me. I thought, there is amongst us something that is a bipedal humanoid, morphologically identical to the human being but which is not human. It is not human to complain that starving children are keeping you awake. And there … was born my idea that within our species is a bifurcation, a dichotomy between the truly human and that which mimics the truly human.”

Herb Jaffe optioned the book and Robert Jaffe wrote a screenplay in 1973 that Dick claimed “turned it into a comedy—a spoof, along the lines of Get Smart. Everybody was a clown and it was full of smart ass remarks.” Dick was relieved when Jaffe’s option lapsed. In December 1980, Hampton Fancher wrote the first script for what would turn out to be the Ridley Scott movie and Dick was as dissatisfied with it as he’d been with Jaffe’s. Terming it “Philip Marlowe meets The Stepford Wives,” he wrote an angry essay for SelecTV Guide, criticizing SF films like Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) for using special effects instead of a story, and insinuating Blade Runner would fall into the same category, a simplistic shoot-’em-up with fantastic Douglas Trumbull special effects. He wasn’t pleased that Scott had told an interviewer that he had found the book too difficult to finish. Dick’s attitude toward the project changed drastically when he read David Peoples’s February 1981 rewrite. Peoples maintained his draft had been inspired by Fancher’s, but Dick insisted it was faithful to the book and—he was correct—“in some ways Peoples improved over the book.… Each reinforces the other. If you start out with the book, the screenplay adds material to that, and if you start out with the screenplay, the book adds material to that, so they’re beautifully symmetrical.” Dick believed Peoples’s shooting script contained his two major themes. In Starlog :

In Dick’s novel, Deckard is an active android bounty hunter in San Francisco, after a nuclear war. He is (unhappily) married, not divorced, and his wife lays a guilt trip on him for his line of work. Like everyone else, Rick adheres to Mercerism, a quasireligion that I make out as a celebration of being human; constantly watches TV comedian Buster Friendly; takes artificial brain stimulation to alter moods; and dreams of owning one of the few remaining real animals on earth (fake animals are the next best thing). The androids he tracks down are without the sympathetic qualities of their film counterparts. They have no feelings for each other or other living things. They represent pure evil. The book’s Rachael is more sympathetic than the rogue androids, yet she too is cold—she spitefully kills Deckard’s prize goat (to compensate for his murdering her comrades?). Rachael looks exactly like Pris, as they are the same android model. That’s why Deckard worries that he won’t be able to shoot Pris. There is no subplot having to do with androids trying to convince their maker (Rosen, rather than Tyrell) to increase their life span. Mercerism proves to be a sham; Buster Friendly turns out to be an android; Deckard discovers a parallel police department run by androids and senses that he — and everyone else—may be an android, because there is no longer a clear distinction between man and android.

××

The origin of the novel was Dick’s research of Nazis for his book The Man in the High Castle. In the late forties he had come across prime Nazi documents, including thediary of an S.S. man stationed in Warsaw.

“The first is what constitutes the essential human being and how do we distinguish and define the essential human being from that which only masquerades as human.… And the second theme is the tragic theme that if you fight evil, you will wind up becoming evil, and that’s the condition of life.… Deckard, to kill the replicants … is brutalized and dehumanized.… You have Deckard becoming more and more dehumanized and the replicants becoming more and more human, and at the end they meet and the distinction is gone. But this fusion of Deckard and the replicants is a tragedy. This is not a victory where the replicants become humanized and there is some victory by humanity over inhumanity. This is horrifying because he is now as they are. So the theme of the novel is completely and essentially retained.”

I only disagree with the last statement because the

film replicants turn out to be sympathetic, not pure evil.

L.A.’s 45 +- year-old Union Station—a set Scott liked because of “the art deco and neo-Fascist architecture.” Deckard’s favorite noodle bar was designed by Paull, who wanted it to be an outdoor version of the White Castle hamburger joints he loved as a kid in the forties. Characters dress in outfits that mix future, present, and past. Policemen wear uniforms that combine the style of the forties with projections of the future. Pedestrians look like they come from countless eras, from every possible country. There are even Hare Krishnas, as well as young men with New Wave hairstyles and dark glasses.

Because Dick died suddenly before the release of the film, it’s difficult to guess how he would have approved of the final result. Disastrous screenings in Denver and Dallas—the audiences expected a Harrison Ford film along the lines of Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)—caused Scott to make changes and, in some cases, revert back to Fancher’s script. The controversial narration and an upbeat ending were added (only to be disposed of, mistakenly I believe, in subsequent Director’s Cuts). At the very least, Dick would have approved of the look of the film. When I interviewed Ridley Scott for Omni’s ScreenFlights/ScreenFantasies (1984), he said Dick once visited the set and looked at Trumbull’s just-completed special effects work: ××

Deckard and Sebastian dress in what appear to be, in the year 2019, functional clothes that are long out of style—those clothes that are in fashion are either too expensive or, judging from the department store mannequins, kinky. Zhora looks ready for an S&M party. Pris looks like a cross between a New Wave punk and a hooker on New York’s 8th Avenue. Rachael’s stunning black suit, with each stripe consisting of a separate piece of silk, and with the wide shoulders and trim waist, is appropriate for heroines of forties film noir. With her hair tied back, dark brows and eyeshadow, watery eyes, red lips, perfect skin, and swirling cigarette smoke serving as a veil, beautiful Sean Young’s Rachael is supposed to be like those mysterious movie heroines who, the heroes had to decide, were either completely honest and loyal or “inhuman,” with blood that ran ice cold. As much as the wet, dark, neon-lit streets and claustrophobic imagery (hypnotically filmed by Jordan Cronenweth), Rachael is a visual reminder that we are watching classic film noir transported to the future. Deckard may have a futuristic job — blade runner—but he is the classic disillusioned, morally ambivalent detective hero, complete with hard-boiled narration. Scott told me:

“Dick was more than delighted—I think he was stunned by the look of our environment. He said it was exactly how he had envisioned the world with which we were dealing. Blade Runner was a difficult project to conceive because it is set only about thirty-five years from now, in a ‘tangible’ future rather than the obscure future of Alien... I think that the mistake a lot of futuristic films make when they attempt short leaps forward in time is that they devastate whole cities and erect hokey-looking utopias. Things wouldn’t work that way... As we move farther and farther into the future, the probability is that the construction of new buildings will diminish … and the constant repairing, shoring up, and modernization of older architecture will begin to take on a rather retrofitted look. Our vision was really of a clogged world, where you get the sense of a city on overload, where things may stop at any time... Everything is old or badly serviced, and the bureaucratic system running the city is totally disorganized. One of the few things in fine order is advertising. I expect by this time that billboards and electric signs will be everywhere.”

××

Indeed, what’s so frightening about what we see in the picture—the environment, the technology, the clothes and makeup, genetically produced human and animal duplicates—is that it seems to be a logical future for us. (Only the off-colony exodus seems rushed.) In this cautionary tale, we are presented with much from our own present and past to remind us that what we see is the end result of our unfortunate progression. The colossal, sloping high-rise buildings are patterned after Egyptian pyramids or, suggests SF writer Robert Silverberg, “Aztec temples or Babylonian ziggurats”; the columns at the Tyrell Corporation are more suitable for a Greek or Roman palace; Trumbull designed Tyrell’s bedroom as if it were the pope’s in the Vatican. The setting used for Deckard’s cluttered, claustrophobic, low-ceilinged apartment is a Frank Lloyd Wright house built in the 1920s in the Los Feliz hills; the police department is located in what is

“When we first meet Deckard, he is already thinking of [permanently] giving up his job as professional exterminator. The job was in fact getting to him, as it did to, say, Philip Marlowe. His attitude toward his profession had already discolored his vision of the world and affected his attitude toward himself. As in classic detective stories, his background is suggested by innuendo rather than fact; but what I wanted to do at the beginning was show a man who wanted to change his whole way of life and was in a way trying to find some kind of absolution or, maybe, a conscience.”

The reviews of Blade Runner that most annoyed me when it was released were those that claimed the film had no theme and had such poorly drawn characters that it appeared the replicants were more human than Deckard. Somehow there were many critics who failed to comprehend that it was by intention that the replicants came across as more human than Deckard and that, in fact, this was the missing theme they were looking for. Remember how critics who reviewed 2001 thought they were making a clever observation

when they asserted the HAL 9000 computer seemed more human than the human characters? Of course, this was Stanley Kubrick’s intention. Keir Dullea’s Bowman doesn’t regain his humanity and display human emotions until he battles and defeats the machine, reestablishing man’s supremacy over machine (thereby qualifying to meet his gods). At the beginning of Blade Runner, Deckard has withdrawn into the wave of impersonal humanity on the L.A. streets. He is, as his ex-wife complained, a “cold fish.” He suppresses his (human) feelings with alcohol and a heavy dose of guilt for having killed replicants. It’s through his interaction with the supersophisticated, lifelike replicants during the course of the film that he regains his emotions —if a replicant can have emotions, then so can a blade runner—and establishes himself as the earth’s one male human being: His ability to love is rekindled by Rachael—Ford and Young didn’t get along but their seduction scene is incredibly erotic —and he learns to appreciate life because of Batty’s generous decision to let him live. (Having been taught to love by Deckard, and having learned from him that she has a finite but indeterminate life span, Rachael, though a replicant, evolves into the one female human being.) It is fortunate for Deckard that the replicants he engages have been endowed with human qualities that humans no longer have in these inhuman times — it is only through interaction with them that he becomes as human as they are. In Dick’s book the replicants are evil, so when Deckard becomes like them, he becomes evil—but in the film, through sincere, sensitive Rachael and Batty’s gracious final act, we realize that if Deckard becomes like these replicants it is a positive step. Indeed, Deckard may be a replicant, as Scott believes, but he at least qualifies to carry humanity’s torch.

slave wants to kill him; he is like a Frankenstein who doesn’t understand why his monster has returned to kill his maker, the person who provided him with a hellish life. On the other hand, Deckard is like a man hired to track down runaway slaves in pre-Civil War America who becomes enlightened. He comes to realize that replicants are not only equal to humans, but are everything humans should be. So are they human? When Rachael flees his apartment, he tells her, “I’ve had people walk out on me before”; when he kills Zhora he refers to her as a woman. Disposing of Batty, Zhora, Leon, and Pris becomes for Deckard like killing four human murderers—if they hadn’t committed heinous crimes, he surely couldn’t do it and live with himself. (He could never harm Rachael.) Their crimes aren’t forgivable but are understandable considering their fears and impossible situation. So trying to kill them is more traumatic—surely it helps to know they would die soon anyway—and painful than Bowman’s dismantling of the human-like HAL in 2001.

Blade Runner deals with the arrogance of the rich, who would literally trash their home world, turn it into a barely habitable ghetto, and simply fly away to the off-colony suburbs and leave their mess for the poor. And like those who settled earth’s New World in the seventeenth century, they expect slave labor. That gap is filled by replicants, subjugated workers of the future who are considered less valuable than animals, have no legal rights, and, like the light bulb to which insensitive Tyrell equates Batty, are not built to last so that new ones can be sold. Man is so arrogant that he would create these genetically human androids, give them more intelligence and athletic proficiency than humans and the ability to develop the exact emotions of man, yet still consider himself superior to them. He is so arrogant that he assumes such creations would be satisfied being slaves to man. And he is so insensitive that he doesn’t bother to provide the replicants with a life span that compares to that of human beings, much less the reasonable life span man has been denied by God. Smug Tyrell actually thinks Batty should be grateful for his four years of existence. (Of course, we wouldn’t be happy being born into our prime of life knowing we had only four years left.) He is like a slave owner who, because he hasn’t killed his slave as the law permits, doesn’t understand why the

ii.

MIDNIGHT MAGIC

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget Box office

Jim Shar man Michael White Jim Shar man, Richard O’Br ien The Rocky Hor ror Show by Richard O’Br ien August 14, 1975 100 minutes $1.4 million $140.2 million

The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its generation of a cult phenomenon have received attention in the national popular press, but its particular characteristics and components have not been studied in detail. Because of the continuing popularity of the film and especially because of the participation of the audience in the “event,” the film provides a unique opportunity for a case-study investigation of the cult phenomenon.

characters act as referents to characters in other, older films. Sight gags and song lyrics also draw on other movies. The film presents a clever synthesis of thematic, visual, and verbal elements which, with a good deal of panache, parody and satirize accepted cinematic and societal conventions. A distinguishing feature of the audience members for Rocky Horror is their level and frequency of interaction with both the movie and each other.

Cult films are the “private genre” of “the privileged children of the middle class,” according to Monaco. He traces the beginning of the cult film phenomenon to “the late sixties as camp interest developed in Roger Corman’s various monster and motorcycle movies.” He cursorily identifies several attributes as constituent elements of the cult film. The films are “generally offered at Friday and Saturday midnight screenings in college towns across the U.S.” to a young audience. A “general trend has been toward what we might call a trash esthetic in cult” laced with a “vivid element” of sadomasochism. The films also are populated by “egregiously eccentric characters”, are inexpensively produced using on-location settings. Monaco is probably correct, although this cannot be readily verified, in stating that the cult film phenomenon began in the 1960s. Distribution and exhibition practices (e.g., vertical integration) prior to this time would most likely not have permitted the occurrence of what will be defined here as a cult film.

Although actual audience participation could not be measured by a questionnaire prior to viewing, two measures of preparation for such participation could be readily assessed: bringing “props” and dressing like one of the film’s characters. Overall, slightly more than half of the respondents brought some form of prop with them. No significant difference in who brought props was found between first-timers, veterans, and regulars, or by sex, although regulars were far more likely than the veterans to report having done so in the past. By far the most popular prop, as the table shows, is rice. A variety of water sprayers (for the rain sequence) and newspapers were also popular items. Newspapers are used to imitate Janet as she walks through the rain holding one over her (they may also offer protection from the other audience members’ water spraying and rice throwing). Less frequently mentioned props include marshmallows, eggs, potatoes, balloons, bird seed, noisemakers, teddy bears, and ears and nose masks. Thus, while not everyone brings a prop to the theater, those who do come well prepared.

Two items which tend not-to define the cult film are the intent of the filmmaker and the film’s content. Cult films are not dead (as, for example, one sets out to make a musical, western, etc.) as much as they happen or become. Conceivably, however, the actual content of the film that later becomes a cult film might very well have something-or a great deal-to do with its later status. For instance, cult films such as Rocky Horror appear to have a close affinity with the elements of Sontag’s definition of “Camp” (and, more specifically, what she terms “deliberate Camp”). Sontag states that “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric-something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” Thus in Sontag’s terms Rocky Horror and its audience clearly qualify as Camp. However, this cannot be said to be true of all cult films.

Costuming oneself like one of the film’s characters is a more extreme form of participation, a form of public commitment. Overall, relatively few in this sample indicated that they had ever dressed up. Nearly half of the regulars, though, reported such behavior. No significant difference between the sexes was found. Among those audience members who had dressed up, Rocky Horror’s leading character, Frank N. Furter, was the most popular model. No significant difference between veterans and regulars as to character copied was found. In summary, persons who have dressed like one of the film’s characters make up only a tiny minority of the Rocky Horror audience and are largely regulars. This finding tends to contradict the implication by Shah and others that dressing up is a widespread and popular phenomenon. As Table 6 shows, the most common reason for first-timers’ attendance to Rocky Horror is the reputed unique nature of the film and the audience. Wordof-mouth “advertising” plays a large part in their attendance decision. Few first-timers mention quality of the film as the factor which attracted them. (In fact, respondents in Earnest’s study reported “a very average rating” for the film; people generally thought it was “not a terrific film.”) The social experience promised by Rocky Horror’s reputation and satisfaction of one’s curiosity

The film history and audience activity surrounding The Rocky Horror Picture Show provide an excellent case study of the intensity and vadety of the cult film phenomenon. The film itself may be characterized as both a parody and a metamovie. In a burlesque fashion, the film details the overnight experiences of a stereotypical American couple, Brad and Janet, who innocently seek help from the inhabitants nearby after their car breaks down and encounter an odd assortment of earthly and extraterrestrial characters. The film blends science fiction, horror, and both rock and roll and traditional musical genres, and the picture’s

are potent drawing cards for first-time viewers. Attendance for veterans and regulars clearly means more than simply going to a film or even Rocky Horror. On the evenings when the interviews were conducted for this study, the ticket line would begin to form as early as 10 p.m, a full two hours before the show. A good deal of socializing took place while waiting in line. In fact, the queuing behavior appeared to be less of a wait and more of an opportunity to meet one another, talk with friends, and re-establish acquaintances. From casual observation, much of the in-line activity seemed to be an important prelude to the more intense activity which was to occur later on in the theater. What this study suggests, then, about the cult film phenomenon as a whole is that it is the event that attracts and continues to support the popularity of a cult film. The preparation, the waiting, and finally the active participation in the viewing of the film itself appear to be part of a group ritual which characterizes the audience of the cult film. Further examination of the audiences for cult films is clearly warranted. The cult film has existed for more than a decade and, as Earnest states, the midnight movie audience is a â&#x20AC;&#x153;market that has a slow build, but there is a definite market there.â&#x20AC;? Many questions remain to be answered. Why does audience participation occur? What are the social and psychological needs of the audience that are being met and presumably gratified by the Rocky Horror experience? How are these needs met? What factors can be identified that determine the process of how and why one individual becomes a Rocky Horror regular and others do not? Why donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t all veterans go on to become regulars? To what extent is the content of the cult film an important element in drawing repeat attendance and what are the most salient components? Finally, why are these components important to the audience?

Eraserhead

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

David Lynch David Lynch David Lynch March 19, 1977 88 minutes $20,000 $7 million

When I turned 16, I did not receive a new car or an ostentatious party or the revelation of heretofore unknown powers that would allow me to overthrow the confusingly designed dystopian society to which I belonged. Instead, I got something better—I got my mind permanently blown through the gift, courtesy of my Uncle Edward, of a VHS tape of Eraserhead, David Lynch’s one-of-a-kind debut feature that had become a notorious cult classic ever since its 1977 debut. At this time, I had certainly heard about the film—I had read the tantalizing pieces on them in such invaluable books as Danny Peary’s “Cult Movies” and J. Hoberman & Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Midnight Movies”— and I had seen Lynch’s subsequent efforts The Elephant Man, Dune and the jaw-dropping Blue Velvet, and was therefore certainly primed to finally experience his maiden work at last since none of the video stores in my area were adventurous enough to stock it. My only worry when I settled in to watch it—with my entire family, for reasons lost in the mists of time and a decision that would quickly prove to be spectacularly ill-advised—was that I had built it up so highly in my mind by that point that I feared that it would be almost impossible for it to match my expectations.

with Lynch), a label printer whose uber-nerdish look and demeanor is topped off, literally, by a hairdo that makes it seem as if he is receiving constant electrical shocks. One night, he returns home to his beyondshabby apartment to learn that he has been invited to dinner with his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart), in order to meet her parents. In the most deranged variation of the boyfriend-meets-the-family trope ever produced, Mary’s mother makes Henry answer any number of embarrassing questions—several of them twice — and even licks his face at one point. Her grandmother sits in the corner in a catatonic state; her overly jovial dad brags about how he has no feeling in his left arm; there is a litter of puppies nursing on the floor; dinner consists of tiny man-made chickens that spurt hideous goo whenever someone cuts into them. To top all that off, it is revealed that Mary has given birth to a premature baby (“They aren’t even sure that it is a baby!,” Mary wails) and her parents insist that the two get married and take it home with them. Ah, the baby —how to describe it? Imagine a cross between a fetal version of E.T. and some form of skinned ruminant that has been plagued with an eternal cold that causes it to cry, whine and spit up various forms of goo practically around the clock. After presumably a couple of days of this grotesque version of domestic tranquility, Mary flees for home and leaves Henry in charge at precisely the point where the child becomes seriously ill. Oddly enough, Henry pulls it together enough to nurse the kid back to something resembling health, but, after a series of increasingly twisted visions/hallucinations involving Mary (Judith Anna Roberts), the prostitute across the hall, who appears on a stage to sing about how wonderful things are in Heaven while stomping sperm-like creatures with her feet, he is finally driven to do something hideous to his own flesh and blood.

Needless to say, the film not only matched my expectations, it exceeded them in ways I never dreamed could be possible. Here was a film that took elements that one might have encountered in other movies in the past—black humor, gore, surrealism, erotic imagery, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and oddball performances—and presented them in such a unique and deeply personal manner that the end result was something that literally looked, sounded and felt like nothing that had ever come before it. I may not have been able to explain any of it when it was all over but for every single one of its 89 minutes, I was absolutely mesmerized.

The above description may more or less describe what happens during Eraserhead (though I see I have neglected to mention such elements as the bookend appearances by a horribly burned man who sits at a window yanking a crank that sends more of those sperm-like creatures into the world and the extended dream sequence that eventually give the film its name) but it hardly begins to suggest how it happens. Utilizing hallucinatory production design and special effects, haunting black-and-white cinematography by Frederick Elmes and Hebert Cardwell and an astonishingly complex soundscape by designer Alan Splet that combines industrial noise, leaky steam radiators and the music of Fats Waller, Lynch plunges viewers into a world unlike any other in the history of film— imagine the cinematic equivalent of the third sleepless night after being struck down with the world’s nastiest head cold— and one that leaves viewers feeling as adrift and alienated as Henry himself.

The amazing thing is that since that first viewing, I have seen the film countless times in any number of situations—on that VHS tape and on DVD, in theaters during normal working hours and at midnight, on cable and now on the fabulous new Blu-ray special edition from the Criterion Collection (featuring such bells and whistles as a 2001 documentary featuring Lynch discussing the production history of the film and amazing behind-the-scenes footage, new interviews with members of the cast, six short films directed by Lynch and a gorgeous new 4K presentation of the film itself). Every time I watch, I remain just as enraptured with the film and its mysteries, which have held up over the years to such a degree that I suspect that to even attempt a basic synopsis would drive me to madness in attempting to convey its magic in mere words. Set in a grim, unnamed world, during what is presumably at least a mildly post-apocalyptic age and definitely on the wrong side of the tracks regardless, the film focuses on Henry Spencer (Jack Nance, in the first of what would prove to be many collaborations

Although the end results may prove to be too alienating for some viewers, they are nevertheless astonishing to behold in terms of their formal beauty and are even more so when one considers that the film was

shot piecemeal over the course of a couple of years, first with funding provided by the American Film Institute and, when that ran out, with funds supplied from such sources as production designer (and Lynch friend) Jack Fisk, Fisk’s wife Sissy Spacek and money Lynch earned from a paper route. ( In one of the DVD supplements, Lynch points out a moment where Henry opens a door to note that the scene of him entering the room itself was shot more than a year later.) Despite the gaps in its production, the film as a whole creates a singular mood and sustains it from the first frames to the last.

(Much like the image of Harold Lloyd dangling from the clock, even people who haven’t seen the film certainly recognize the iconic image of Henry and his inimitable hairdo.) Today, this would be all but unheard of— even if the midnight movie scene existed as it once did, a film of this sort would almost certainly be relegated to a couple of underground festivals and even if a distributor were to take a chance on booking it commercially, it is unlikely they would have the patience to give it a chance to attract viewers before yanking it in order to play something with a better chance of attracting audiences. As a result, watching Eraserhead today can be a somewhat melancholic experience in this regard for those who once experienced it in its after-hours glory and realize that the time when something like this could thrive has long since passed. (This is ironic considering that the film is one of the few midnight movies that actually plays well at home —provided that your home system is set up properly (and the Blu-ray offers up a calibration test to help with that)— as it is arguably only one that does not exactly lend itself to the collective moviegoing experience in the manner of such contemporaries as The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Pink Flamingoes.)

That mood has lasted from the time of its premiere until today and much of that is due to the fact that, unlike virtually every other classic film, Eraserhead is a work that resolutely defied all attempts to explain either what it means or even the mechanics of how it was produced. The script is a brilliant mixture of narrative and experimental structure that provides just enough storytelling points to give viewers something to hang on to, at least in the early going, before completely subsuming them with its more avant-garde moments later on. The result is a film in which all of the elements may not necessarily add up but which nevertheless maintains a logical consistency throughout that is too often lacking in a lot of experimental cinema—even if you don’t quite get what you are seeing, you never get the sense that Lynch is just making stuff up as he goes along in order to score an immediate visceral impact to the detriment of everything else.

David Lynch would, of course, go on to become one of the most controversial and acclaimed filmmakers of our time and his idiosyncratic visions would even strike chords with mainstream audience, as evidenced by the commercial success of such projects as The Elephant Man (which he was hired for largely due to producer Mel Brooks’s fascination with Eraserhead), Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mullholland Drive. As excellent as his subsequent films would prove to be, Eraserhead remains Lynch’s purest work of art. Granted, the film may not be for everyone (my mother considers the title to be a dirty word, though she did dig Mulholland Drive) but for those who manage to find themselves on its admittedly peculiar wavelength, Eraserhead continues to be a stunning work that quite simply redefines what a feature film can do both to and for audiences willing to take the journey.

At the same time, while some have attempted to explain Eraserhead as Lynch’s nightmarish take on the perils of domesticity or as a pro or anti-abortion tract, it is a testament to the power and purity of his vision that even after all of these years, it still cannot simply be reduced to a bunch of talking points. To “explain” Eraserhead would be like cutting a drum open to see what makes the noise—you may get your answer but you tend to ruin the drum in the process. Thankfully, this is a drum that should continue to make noise for decades to come. (Significantly, even though this Bluray is filled with bonus materials that tell the story of how the film came to be, it nevertheless manages to leave its deepest mysteries—from what it is all “supposed to mean” to the exact mechanics behind the presentation of the baby—as perplexing as ever.) When Eraserhead premiered in 1977, it received largely poor reviews and minuscule returns at the box office and might have drifted off into obscurity were it not for the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, whose championing of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo a few years earlier made it a cult sensation through regular screenings on the then-developing midnight movie circuit. Based on little more than a gut feeling, Barenholtz took the film on, and, even after its initial playdates met with little success, he continued to have faith in it and convinced a theater owner in New York to keep it on until it eventually developed a loyal fan base that kept it playing for the next few years and made it one of the most (in)famous of all cult movies.

The Room

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Tommy Wiseau Tommy Wiseau Tommy Wiseau June 27, 2003 99 minutes $6 million less than $2,000

At a midnight screening in a Los Angeles multiplex, the atmosphere hovers somewhere between rambunctious and mildly terrifying. Whenever a framed photograph of a spoon appears on screen, which it frequently does, audience members throw fistfuls of plastic cutlery. They also perform skits, at one point gathering at the bottom right of the screen and shouting, “Down here, Tommy!” anticipating the moment when the face of the lead actor, Tommy Wiseau, looks in their direction. And they comment loudly on blurrily shot scenes (“Focus!”) or inadequately introduced characters (“Who the fuck are you?”). Late-night showings of cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Big Lebowski are known for their rowdy and strange behavior too. But people who go to see Rocky Horror and Lebowski think those films are good. Tonight’s movie, an obscure, five-yearold drama called The Room, holds a different place in the hearts of those present at West Hollywood’s Laemmle Sunset 5. “It’s absolutely terrible,” says Chris Bonk, a talent-agency assistant who has seen the film more than 15 times. ”The script is not the best. The acting is certainly not the best. The music is horrible.” The Room is a San Francisco-set love triangle involving a banker named Johnny, his friend Mark, and Johnny’s fiancée Lisa, who is sleeping with both men. The film does seem to be beset with problems. Various subplots are inadequately resolved or simply disappear altogether, including the throwaway revelation that Lisa’s mother is suffering from cancer. The film’s many rooftop shots feature an unrealistic San Francisco backdrop, thanks to some less-than-impressive greenscreen work. There are lengthy, unerotic sex scenes, the last of which prompts a section of the audience to depart the auditorium temporarily in mock protest. Finally, in one sequence, a sharp bone seems about to erupt from Lisa’s neck for no reason at all. The film’s so-bad-it’s-freakin’-awesome vibe has attracted a devout army of aficionados whose membership includes the cream of Hollywood’s comedy community. Role Models star Paul Rudd and Arrested Development’s David Cross are both fans, as is Jonah Hill, who uses a still from the movie as his MySpace photograph. Heroes star Kristen Bell hosts Roomviewing parties at her house and last year attended the film’s monthly Laemmle screening with Rudd, Hill, and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright. “There is a magic about that film that is indescribable,” she says. The Room has even infiltrated the halls of cinematic academia. × × “It is one of the most important films of the past decade,” says Ross Morin, an assistant professor of film studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. “It exposes the fabricated nature of Hollywood. The Room is the Citizen Kane of bad movies.”

If The Room is the Citizen Kane of bad movies, that makes Tommy Wiseau the Orson Welles of crap. Wiseau — who speaks with a thick, Schwarzeneggerian accent — directed, wrote, and produced the film. The muscled auteur also plays the cuckolded Johnny, and, when not exposing his ivory rump in the film’s sex scenes, gives a performance that’s both heartfelt and berserk. In one scene, a vein-poppingly distraught Wiseau howls the line, “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” The moment — a favorite of Room fans — is reminiscent of both James Dean’s “You’re tearing me apart!” howl in Rebel Without A Cause and Marlon Brando screaming “Stella!” in A Streetcar Named Desire. At least it would be, if those actors had chosen to play their parts as deranged Austrians. The Los Angeles-based Wiseau is an admirer of Streetcar playwright Tennessee Williams and (indeed) Orson Welles. “You can relate to it,” he says of their work, over lunch in L.A. the day after the Laemmle screening.

“You see all this emotion. That’s why we are on the same page.” Wiseau is also a big fan of Dean and Brando, but he insists that any discussion of specific films that may have influenced him be off the record. While the actor-director is friendly and infectiously upbeat about his work, he is also incredibly secretive. Wiseau shies away from questions about his background and his age, though he appears to be in his early 50s. “We tried for a long time to figure out where he’s from,” says actress Juliette Danielle, who plays Lisa in The Room. “We never got an answer.” After some prodding, Wiseau does let slip a few personal details. “I used to live in France, a long time ago,” he says. “Then I moved to New Orleans — I have family there. Then I moved to Bay Area. I work for hospital, I work for the city. But I always wanted to be an actor.” Wiseau got his directorial feet wet with a short film, Robbery Doesn’t Pay, and then, in 2002, shot The Room in L.A. and San Francisco. The filmmaker has always refused to discuss where he got the movie’s $6 million budget, but he now hints that at least some of the money came from a clothing import business. “I tell you a little bit, but that’s it,” he says. “We import from Korea the leather jackets that we design here in America. If you work, you have to save money, right? I didn’t get money from the sky. I was preparing, let’s put it this way.” The shoot was marred by the constant departures of cast and crew members. “It was just mayhem,” recalls Dan Janjigian, who plays a drug dealer in one of the film’s peculiar plot cul-de-sacs. “You could come in and it would be a completely different cast and crew. It was crazy.” Wiseau himself initially denies that he had problems with his behindthe-camera team — “I was very happy with everyone” — but then admits that he did come into conflict with individuals who tried to tamper with his work.

××

Danielle attended the second-anniversary screening and encountered fans dressed as her character. One even wore a prosthetic neck piece in homage to that scene in which it appears Lisa is about to endure a freakish compound fracture.

Some of the crew members, it’s correct, we changed three times basically, because they tried, for example, to change the script. They say, “This is the way to do, etcetera, etcetera.” I say, “No!”

However, according to one cast member who requested anonymity, the script was indeed altered during the shoot: “It was actually a lot longer. There was stuff that was just unsayable. I know it’s hard to imagine there was stuff that was worse. But there was.”

By the time the film’s third anniversary rolled around, in 2006, word of The Room had spread through the comedy scene. “I was at Paul Rudd’s house a couple of years ago, and he said, ‘You have to watch this,”’ recalls Rudd’s frequent collaborator and Role Models director David Wain. “Within two minutes, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.’ I’ve watched it over and over and over. We’ve had a lot of fun thinking which character we’re going to play when we do our shot-for-shot remake.” Rudd also showed the film to Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, who in turn recommended it to the show’s star, Kristen Bell. “I watched it in my trailer with my mouth agape the entire time,” she recalls. ”I knew I would never be the same. We tried to reference it on Veronica Mars as much as possible.” In one example, during a May 2007 episode of the show, a character mentions “the new Rocky Horror,” where “people throw plastic spoons at the screen.”

Wiseau insists he always intended The Room to be partly comedic, and that the movie’s perceived faults — including the out-of-focus scenes — are deliberate. “Let’s assume we did everything perfect way,” he hypothesizes. “You will be asking this question? No, no.” However, another anonymous cast member has no doubt that Wiseau is merely making the best of an extremely bad job: “I don’t have anything to say about Tommy as a person. He is a nice guy. But he is full of shit. He was trying to put together a drama. It was basically his stage to show off his acting ability.” Tommy Wiseau insists that he “really doesn’t know” how the film fared at the box office on its initial release. However, one industry source states that the combined gross from the two-week run at two theaters — the Laemmle Fallbrook and Fairfax — was just $1,900. Michael Rousselet, a young screenwriter who seems to be Patient Zero of the film’s cult, says he first caught the movie at an “absolutely empty” theater. “It was like our own private Mystery Science Theater,” he says. “I was calling friends during the end and saying, ‘You have to come to this movie.’ We saw it four times in three days, and on the last day I had over 100 people there.” Soon, screenings of The Room were thick with both laughter and cutlery. “The spoon thing probably started during the fourth screening with my friends,” says Rousselet. “I was like, Why is there a spoon in the picture frame? Every time it came up, I’d scream ‘Spoon!’ So we brought spoons.” Wiseau says that he received ”almost a hundred” e-mails thanking him for the film. “That’s when I say, ‘Let’s just show The Room once a month, midnight screening,”’ he explains.

David Cross became intrigued by The Room while filming the 2004-05 season of Arrested Development. “Will Arnett and I would always see the billboard and be like, ‘What the fuck is that thing?”’ he says. “Will Googled it, and then we would often watch the trailer.” Soon, the pair were cracking each other up by repeating Wiseau’s signature line: “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” Then, at the 2005 Screen Actors Guild awards, Cross noticed a familiar figure. “I was like, Holy shit, Tommy Wiseau’s here!” he says. “I was kind of drunk, and kept following him. I was literally finding every excuse to be next to him wherever he was in the building. He was getting weirded out by me.” Eventually Cross made the pilgrimage to see The Room itself. “The idea of a participatory thing doesn’t sound like fun to me,” he says, “but I really, really enjoyed it. It’s not like there’s one or two or three things that are bad about it. There are several hundred. I don’t think Will ever saw it,” Cross laughs. “What a fucking asshole he is!” Wiseau is mum about whether he will see any profit from the film, though it seems doubtful. According to one billboard industry expert, the signage on Highland probably cost in the region of $5,000 a month, comfortably more than the gross box office of the midnight screenings. And one source close to the production admits that the movie “hasn’t cleared expenses.” Wiseau himself attests that he is “an artist, I really don’t like to talk about money.”

Wiseau regularly attended these events and answered questions. Sometimes he recited Shakespearean sonnets. Wiseau released The Room on DVD in December 2005, and produced another, promotional, DVD that featured fans of the film at screenings praising the Room experience. And he continued to pay for the billboard, which, as the years passed, became a local landmark until Wiseau finally gave it up in the fall of 2008. “People started coming up to me randomly in L.A. and saying, ‘Were you in The Room?”’ says Paris. She wasn’t the only cast member to achieve a degree of fame thanks to the film. When Greg Sestero, who plays Mark, attended a screening a year after the movie’s release, he says he was “mobbed” by fans. Juliette

His secrecy has been key to the film’s success. (As Wain puts it, “Part of the fun is guessing: Who is this guy? Where is he from? Why did he shoot on a greenscreen instead of going up on a roof?”) His Ed Wood-like innocence and enthusiasm for moviemaking has helped as well: Rudd declined to talk about

The Room for this article because he didn’t want to “mock somebody else’s stuff.” And Lo Truglio later got back in touch, concerned that he had been too harsh about Wiseau.””It is a guilty pleasure in every sense of the word,” he says of the movie. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter whether the comedy in the film is intentional or accidental. Wiseau always planned for The Room to provoke a reaction and entertain, and it has certainly done both those things. And how many other independent filmmakers can claim to have entranced — and even influenced — such a roll call of comedic luminaries? “Anything that I’ve seen that many times seeps into my subconscious,” says David Wain. “In the same way that Steve Martin or Woody Allen movies became part of my vocabulary, that’s what happened with The Room. I’m laughing just thinking about it!” The fact is that Wiseau has succeeded where so many big-screen hopefuls have failed. He has made his mark. True, it may not be quite the one he intended. But he has proved, without a doubt, that there is a place — that there is room — in Hollywood for Tommy Wiseau.

iii.

LOCK THE DOORS

Pyscho

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget Box office

Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock Joseph Stef ano Pyscho by Rober t Bloch June 16, 1960 109 minutes $806,947 $50 million

Based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) remains a turning point in the horror cinema for a number of significant reasons, but first and foremost because it knowingly and brazenly flouts the decorum of its age. Psycho features not only nudity, extreme violence, and the early death of a beloved protagonist played by Janet Leigh, it also happens to feature, on-screen, views of…a toilet.

moves with a kind of diabolical, elegant purpose. And that purpose is, simply, to shoot down your defenses one at a time and, in the final revelation of Mrs. Bates’ secret, leave you breathless and shocked. × × “We’re all in our private traps.”

In Psycho, beautiful Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) wants very much to marry her boyfriend, divorcee Sam Loomis (John Gavin), but monetary concerns keeps him from committing to her.

Today, all that (especially the bit about a toilet) doesn’t seem like much to get worked up about. But when the film premiered, Psycho unsettled audiences because its explicit failure to conform to conventional, Hollywood standards meant that all bets were off, and that, likewise, audiences could see and experience anything.

One day, at work, Marion is tasked with taking $40,000 dollars to the bank, but in a moment of desperation, she decides to steal the cash and flee town. Marion escapes from Phoenix, AZ and even switches cars to avoid detection, looking forward to surprising Sam in his home-town, Fairvale. After a long drive, however, Marion decides to call it a day. She spends the night at the Bates Motel, a small, out-of-the-way establishment that stands in the shadow of a giant, dilapidated Gothic mansion.

Accordingly, Psycho’s audiences felt endangered. The narrow parameters of Hollywood decorum and standards of acceptability had sheltered them in previous movie-going experiences, and by deliberately treading outside of those parameters, Psycho suddenly possessed the capacity to shock on a new, previously unplumbed level.

The motel is run by young, lanky Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a lonely man who apparently lives with his old, invalid mother. When Marion shares a meal with Norman, she learns about his mother’s brutal treatment of him, and realizes how Norman has become trapped at the motel, and in an unhappy life. Marion vows not to trap herself, and decides to go home, return the stolen money, and face the consequences of her actions.

Every now and then on Amazon.com or some horror site, you’ll read a review by someone very young who goes back to watch Psycho and just doesn’t get why it is important, or so revered. This viewpoint arises because Psycho, like all films, must be considered and examined in its historical context. And some folks forget that fact. Before Psycho, no one had seen anything like it.

Resolved to set her life right, Marion decides to take a hot shower…

Since, Psycho, filmmakers have been using the same playbook for over fifty years. Some films and filmmakers have surpassed it, too, to be certain, but in its day Psycho shattered formula and blazed a new path. Yet the mere fact that other filmmakers have so often imitated the film’s approach to its material doesn’t take anything away from what Psycho accomplished in the first place.

× × “This is the first place that looks like it’s trying to hide from the world.”

There’s a feeling, watching Psycho (1960), of viewing the world outside typical Hollywood parameters. Hitchcock fosters this feeling from the film’s earliest shots. After a pan across the city of Phoenix, and arriving, finally, at a cracked hotel window, Hitchcock’s camera sneaks in through that narrow portal, exploiting the opening to reveal two attractive – unmarried -- young people (Marion and Sam) after an afternoon of love-making.

What makes Psycho truly great, even today is the manner in which Hitchcock meaningfully connects the film’s form and content. The narrative is shocking and unconventional, the imagery is shocking and unconventional, and, in fact, Psycho’s very structure is unconventional too. Virtually every decision Hitchcock makes as a filmmaker here — save for the very last one (to restore order) — thus creates and nurtures anxiety in viewers. With its blunt looks at an unmarried couple having a sexual liaison, a brutal murder, and even a flushing toilet, Hitchcock — frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot, makes audiences feel that they crossing threshold after threshold.

It’s as though, from the very start, Hitchcock not only pries open a literal window, but the metaphorical window of Hollywood standards and practices. Hitchcock’s other choices in vetting this adaption of Bloch’s novel are just as startling. First, he unsettles the audience by fracturing the role of the protagonist. The audience’s focal point of identification in most Hollywood thrillers is one person: a man or woman who follows the predictable arc of increased learning and ascending knowledge as the three acts progress satisfyingly to a conclusion.

As the taboos fall away, so does any sense of confidence or certainty about what the filmmaker may show us. Psycho continues to impress today because of Hitchcock’s virtuoso technique, but also because it

The arc of “learning” on the part of the movie audience, presented through the experiences of the lead character, is usually a straight line traveling up and up, until, by the movie’s denouement, the character and the viewer reach an apex, or zenith. Apotheosis has occurred. Audiences have learned everything they need to know to understand the film’s narrative, theme, and message.

human and therefore sympathetic. In other words, the director sucks us in with a likable character and her crisis. And then, Hitchcock rips Marion, the star of the movie, away from the audience in the notorious shower scene. We watch helplessly as all our expectations and hopes for Marion — namely that she will return the money, seek a life with Sam, and escape her personal purgatory or trap — run down the tub drain with her spilled blood. Suddenly, everything the audience has taken for granted as “important” in Psycho, including Marion’s dilemma regarding stolen cash is now rendered, categorically, unimportant.

But in Psycho, the protagonist role is unconventionally splintered into three or even four characters: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), Arbogast (Martin Balsam), Lila Crane (Vera Miles) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Learning still occurs over the course of the film’s plot, and the audience still attains that final plateau of knowledge through a psychologist’s detailed and clinical “explanation” of Norman Bates’ psychosis.

The result? The audience is rudderless. Vulnerable. The only thing left to cling to, again, is that stolen cash, and the hope that another human being, perhaps sweet, harmless Norman, will find it and use it to escape from his trap, from his Mother.

Yet importantly, the process of learning is fractured and jumbled by the three acts and the changing point of audience identification. Each protagonist dominates center stage, very roughly, in one particular act.

The movie goes on, and the audience still feels lost without Marion. Thus it soon seizes on laconic, worldweary Arbogast as the focal point of identification.

Marion does so in the first. Arbogast assumes that role in the second. And finally Lila and Sam become the point of identification and the hub of learning in the final act. We especially fear for Lila and Sam’s safety because we have seen, in gory detail, what has become of Marion and Arbogast, our two earlier leads.

Yeah, he’s the guy who’s going to get Norman’s Mother and set things right, for the memory of Marion. He’s got the chops. He’s got the professional background. No one’s going to pull the wool over his eyes. And then Hitchcock violates traditional narrative structure and decorum again. He pulls the exact same trick a second time. He kills Arbogast before our eyes in another visually dazzling murder scene, set this time upon a staircase. And for a second time, the audience loses the focal point of identification.

Since Psycho revolves around schizophrenia -- around a splintering of a single mind into more than one individual -- the film’s very structure actually reflects this state of existence not only in its villain, Norman/ Mother, but in the variety and differentiation of its protagonists. In some sense, it’s as though Hitchock is trying to impress this schizophrenic state upon us, the audience. We are asked to meet, accept, follow, root and then grieve for one protagonist after the other.

Finally, identification transfers to Sam and Lila, but by this point -- on a first viewing of Psycho, anyway -- the audience is surely thinking “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” and therefore reluctant to embrace this couple, not out of loyalty to the dead; but out of the fear that, for a third time, Evil will triumph. Is there another reason it is difficult to warm to Lila and Sam? Absolutely.

In simple terms, then, Hitchcock punishes the audience — and ruthlessly unsettles it — for emotionally investing in the characters. First, Hitchcock makes the audience fall in love with adorable and sexy Marion Crane through her ongoing interior monologue during an extended road trip. This soliloquy of sorts regards the theft of 40,000 dollars, and what the acquisition of the money and the perpetrating of a crime could mean for her life personally, professionally, and legally. Marion berates herself and mocks herself in these passages, like we all do when we talk to ourselves.

They begin to seriously question and threaten Norman Bates, but at this point in the proceedings, the audience is still invested in him and his escape from the motel, and from his twisted, overbearing Mom. Viewers don’t want to see Norman railroaded for what they believe his mother did. They think Sam and Lila are barking up the wrong tree. The unconventional presentation of the protagonists and antagonists in Psycho is all part of Hitchcock’s masterful manipulation, his gleeful manner of misdirecting attention and subverting expectations. Yet he doesn’t merely subvert by way of conveying story points; he does it via the actual narrative structure; by exploding movie conventions.

The device of the interior monologue, in conjunction with the preponderance of gorgeous close-ups during these moments in the car, actually accentuates the feeling of connection to the character and her plight. And of course, that forging of a close emotional connection is intentional. Hitchcock wants audiences heavily invested in Marion’s imagination, her potential, her crime; the very things that make her

The “Janet Leigh” trick as I sometimes call it, isn’t the only trail-blazing, convention-shattering aspect of

Psycho. It’s harder to appreciate this second factor given the direction of our culture since Psycho, but Hitchcock further shatters Hollywood decorum by revealing to the audience shocking imagery it had not often, if ever, seen depicted before. Things like an afternoon, pre-marital assignation in a cheap hotel room between Sam and Marion, or, simply, a toilet being flushed.

from the genre formula and the human being can take his rightful role as the pre-eminent “Monster” in the cinema, thus paving the way for a slew of slashers and serial killers. Indeed, this is the point in horror history where many “monster” horror movie fans cut bait: preferring their monsters as more fantastical creations like vampires, Gill Men, or the Mummy. Here, in Psycho, Dracula’s castle still lurks large in the frame, in the form of the Gothic Bates House, but the monster lurking inside is purely of man’s nature, not of the supernatural. Despite its brilliance and trailblazing, Psycho end with nod to decorum and tradition. Hitchcock closes the film with a restoration of the sense of order. Norman is captured, processed, categorized, diagnosed and understood. A psychiatrist, played by Simon Oakland, explains everything. In this way, an audience might leave a showing of the film knowing that it need not be afraid in real life. The good guys still come out on top; the dangerous bad guy is punished, or at least apprehended.

And then there’s the notorious shower scene. Arriving in 1960, Psycho broke a critical rule/taboo in film history. It showed a vulnerable person virtually nude in the bathroom and then depicted that character brutally murdered in nothing less than a murderous frenzy. Many film critics and Hitchcock scholars have written expertly and at length about the staging and cutting of the Psycho shower scene, but the important thing to remember is how it plays. It is a visualization of frenzy, rage, and madness at close-up range. The helter-skelter pace of the shock editing and the very closeness intimacy?

In the years following Psycho, directors like Tobe Hooper and Brian De Palma would go even further than Psycho to break established movie decorum. Hooper denied the audience (and Chainsaw’s characters) the act of learning in toto; and in Sisters, De Palma did not bother to re-establish order, instead leaving the film’s heroine a confused amnesiac.

Before Psycho, no one had ever seen anything like this. Violence, close-up, with adroit film technique embodying psychosis and powerful anger. And we weren’t seeing a bad guy or some random character being killed. Rather, a woman whom we had, as viewers, fallen in love with. To dispatch Marion when she is vulnerable, when she has so many reasons to live, and to do it in such indecorous, nay un-chivalrous, fashion, is...bracing to say the least. It’s a literal shock to the system.

But those bold, innovative steps in the genre could not have been broached had Hitchcock not re-written the rules of the game first, with Psycho. If you ask yourself why the 1998 remake of Psycho failed, the answer rests not just with re-casting. It is not only because of color photography. It is not, even, because of Hitchcock’s absence in the director’s chair. These are all factors, of course. But that notable failure occurred because that remake failed to re-structure its narrative and format in a pioneering fashion; in a way that would have actually honored Hitchcock and the spirit of the original film.

The presentation of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) represents another shattering of tradition too. Hollywood often lives by the edict that what is beautiful must also be good. And young Anthony Perkins, like Janet Leigh, is certainly beautiful. He is innocent, boyish, graceful, handsome and charming. Simultaneously, he is a brutal murderer when “possessed” by Mother Bates. TWhe film asks us to countenance competing visions of Norman, that he can be both innocent and guilty; a good boy and a very naughty boy at the same time.

Thirty years after Hitchcock fooled everyone, nobody was going to be taken in by exactly the same bag of tricks Chainsaw and Sisters are more valid remakes of Psycho, in the sense that they pursue the same aims, the shattering of standing conventions and decorum.

In large part, Hitchcock was able to get away with this complexity involving the characters, and particularly with Norman, because of the burgeoning popularity of pop psychology in the American culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Horror films such as The Bad Seed (1956) began to ask very pointed questions about human “monsters,” thereby exploring the eternal nature vs. nurture debate. To a very large extent, that’s the terrain as well of Psycho. Norman is a good boy, perhaps, by nature. But a very bad boy via nurture, by his mother’s parenting. Nurture is stamped over nature, in his case, and the result is psychosis.

Despite over a half-century of imitators, Psycho is still a standard-bearer for the genre because of its historical context. Also, on a recent re-watch, I felt too that the film had something very valuable to share with audiences about human nature. It’s sometime easy not to look at the film’s actual story, because Psycho’s form is so exemplary. Yet pay close attention, and one starts to see how Psycho is the story of how the things we do to achieve happiness don’t actually bring us happiness.

This focus on human psychology represents an important turning point in horror history: a period wherein supernatural and fantasy can be subtracted

In Psycho, we see that people will steal, fuck, and commit murder in attempts to find happiness. Instead, invariably, they find “traps” of their own

making, not freedom, or satisfaction. Marion created a shit-storm for herself by stealing forty-thousand dollars. But she did it because she wanted to be with Sam…and he needed money. And Norman is so desperate to feel happy again that he has resurrected his “mother” as a hectoring, violent shrew. He has re-imagined her as a jealous lunatic, and now once he has her back, he can’t get rid of her. She has taken over a part of his very mind. Again, there seems to a corollary visual to go with this idea. Marion finds a point of clarity on the road. She drives through the rain, through a storm, and comes out the other side. After the deluge, she should be cleansed, free. But the place she ends up is the Bates Motel: a location not where she will turn her life around, but die violently. The message seems to be that the plans we make are the very thing that lead us to destruction. Or, to put it in proverbial terms, Man proposes and God disposes. Today, we all know the stylistic twists and turns that make Psycho such a classic horror film, but one need re-watch again it to remember clearly the feelings it engenders. We feel real loss when Marion is killed and Norman, despite his insanity, is a little boy lost who holds our sympathy. Their “private traps” are terrifying ones, but also ones that, surprisingly, still affect us on an emotional level fifty years later. All this week, I’ll be looking at the sequels to Psycho. They may not match the surprise, decorum-shattering genius of Hitchcock’s original, but they do capture, in very poignant terms, the tragedy of Norman Bates.

Night of the Living Dead

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

George A. Romero Karl Hardman, Russell Streiner John A. Russo, George A. Romero October 1, 1968 96 minutes $114,000 $30 million

There has been an veritable outbreak of zombie films in the last few years, from Hollywood blockbusters Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002) and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse (Witt, 2004), to British films such as 28 Days Later (Boyle, 2002) and the zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004). The release in 2004 of Zack Snyder’s remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) attests to the continuing influence and appeal of classic “zombie cinema.” While the cinematic concern with the undead predates Romero’s films, all of the recent films mentioned above have some connection to Romero (Romero was originally scheduled to write the screenplay for Resident Evil, for example, while the recent British films allude frequently to Romero’s work). The following essay is an attempt to account for the continuing attraction of Romero’s first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), nearly forty years after its release.

Living Dead dramatizes the bewildering and uncanny transformation of human beings into non-human forms. Indeed, like all metamorphosis narratives, the film carries uncomfortable messages about identity — about what it means to be a human being and about the terror of alienation. The film’s power to unsettle its audience also derives from its focus on the taboo subject of cannibalism (which it depicts far more graphically than previous zombie films). In the eighteenth century, the English ironist Jonathan Swift (1996) wrote A Modest Proposal, a darkly satirical attack on the privations suffered by the Irish people at the hands of the English in which the author ironically proposed that infants be killed and eaten in order to solve the problem of poverty in Ireland. Night of the Living Dead also uses cannibalism as a metaphor for exploitative power relations. Thus, while it deals with a quite different set of social problems, Romero’s film can also be seen a sinister satire that exploits an outrageous premise in the interests of social and political critique. My specific concern here, however, is with how the film reflects and negotiates the political and social anxieties of the late 1960s.

Shot in black-and-white over seven months on a shoestring budget, Night of the Living Dead defined the modern horror movie and influenced a number of international horror directors, especially those working within the horror genre. The film’s plot of is simple: Barbra and her brother Johnny are attacked when visiting a graveyard to honour the grave of their father. Johnny is attacked and killed by a zombie. Fleeing her attacker, Barbra meets Ben, who is also on the run from the recently reawakened dead. They begin to set up a nearby farmhouse as a fortress and soon discover they are not alone in the house. Two couples have been hiding out in the basement of the house: a young couple, Tom and Judy, and Harry and Helen Cooper, an older married couple with a young daughter who has already been bitten by one of the zombies. When Ben and Harry start arguing over where the safest place in the house is, tensions are created that lead to the downfall of the group. The film ends when Ben is shot by marshals who apparently mistake him for a zombie.

I shall discuss Night of the Living Dead in relation to the formal categories of genre, structure, and theme, with particular reference to the film’s engagement with the politics of race, gender, and violence. While these time-honoured categories are hardly exhaustive of the film’s meaning, I hope that exploring them will take us some way towards understanding the film’s central concerns and its wider cinematic importance and influence. Some of my wider claims about Romero’s ideological vision are unoriginal — the exposition of Romero as a social critic, for example, has been magnificently achieved by Robin Wood (2003), amongst others. Moreover, close readings of the film already exist, most notably the analysis of the film’s “textual and structural” aspects first published in the early 1970s by R. H. W. Dillard (1987) Nonetheless, my discussion (I might almost say disinterment and dissection) of the film offers some original contributions to the film’s generic, stylistic, and structural analysis and explores some of the reasons for its continuing popularity at a time of renewed cultural and cinematic fascination with zombies.

Night of the Living Dead was George Romero’s first feature film and its title has become almost inseparable from its director’s name. This in itself is problematic in that it allows the film’s author to overshadow and even determine the film’s interpretation. Night of the Living Dead certainly encourages auteurist interpretation: Romero both wrote and directed the film and is therefore, like the cinema “greats” Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, or John Ford, an auteur par excellence. But since the film so clearly and insistently engages with its contemporary social and political milieu, we must also try to understand it in its historical context.

Reality Bites: Truth, Genre, and Zombies Genre, of course, often determines how a text is received by its audience. Given its titular identification as a horror film, we know from the start that Night of the Living Dead will present a world in chaos; there is no sense in which the zombie plague is anything other than a catastrophe. In other ways, however, Night of the Living Dead complicates many taken-for-granted critical assumptions about genre. Wells (2001: 7-8) suggests that while science fiction primarily concerns the external, and “macrocosmic,” horror concerns the internal and the “microcosmic.” In other words, the horror genre is concerned with fundamental fears: the primal fear of the unknown and of that which may end life at any moment.

First of all, the disturbing power of Night of the Living Dead has deep historical and cultural roots that can be uncovered through comparisons with much earlier, European texts. Like Franz Kafka’s (1992) classic story of 1914, “Metamorphosis” (which concerns a travelling salesman who is mysteriously transformed into a gigantic insect), Night of the

Certainly, Night of the Living Dead is most immediately concerned with such “inner” fears. Yet the film is also, as we shall see later, replete with references to its contemporary social milieu, severely problematizing the rigid distinction between science fiction and horror suggested above. The “realism” of Night of the Living Dead seems to confound other critical distinctions. In his famous book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Concept (1975), Tzvetan Todorov distinguished between two types of verisimilitude: cultural verisimilitude and generic verisimilitude. The first type refers to texts that aim to be “true to life,” like police drama; the second refers to texts in which the narrative details are true to the conventions of the genre. Horror texts tend, of course, to fall into the latter category. Night of the Living Dead obviously has a generic verisimilitude — while it observes the conventions of the horror genre, it does not, in a literal sense, correspond to any known reality. Yet the film calls into question Todorov’s distinction, since it seems entirely feasible that a world in which zombies did exist would be like the one presented, giving the film — fantastic as it is — a sense of being “true to life.” The plausibility of the zombie outbreak is reinforced by several textual qualities. For example, television news in 1968 appeared in black and white, which would have given Night of the Living Dead a documentary-like feel to the film’s original audiences, at least. This sense of verité is also emphasised in the series of gory still photographs that accompany the film’s closing credits and which recall the photojournalism of the Vietnam war. In other words, the film’s gritty, “realistic” mode of address confers upon the film a “cultural verisimilitude’: the audience is asked to believe that the horrific events depicted could be happening now. This point can be further illustrated with reference to another of Todorov’s ideas about genre. Todorov distinguished between three modes of horror: the “uncanny,” the “marvellous” and the “fantastic.” In the uncanny text, the apparently supernatural is finally explained rationally. In the fantastic text, we hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations of events (as in Henry James famous story The Turn of the Screw). In the marvellous text, the bizarre events of the story can only be explained by reference to another level of reality. From the first appearance of a zombie in the opening graveyard scene, Night of the Living Dead seems to conform to the “marvellous” category. Nonetheless, it is worth emphasizing that Romero makes us believe that this is happening now, so the film cannot be seen simply as a “marvellous” text like Alice in Wonderland. On the contrary, it asks us to believe that there are rational explanations for the zombie’s existence: we are told, however implausibly, that the zombie phenomenon has been caused by radiation from outer space. Insofar as the film posits a rational explanation for the zombie menace, the film is “uncanny.” Thus, rather than presenting a fantastical “alternative” reality, Night of the Living Dead insists on the shocking immediacy of this one.

A Beginning, a Middle, and a Bloody End The film’s sense of urgency and immediacy is also a function of its narrative structure. Night of the Living Dead can be seen to be complexly structured around a number of classic horror film binary oppositions (such as nature and culture, urban and rural). The essential plot of the film, however, is very simple. Night of the Living Dead has a beginning (the graveyard scene), a middle (the defence of the farmhouse) and an end (the tragic shooting of Ben). In this sense, the film — like many Hollywood films — broadly follows a classical Aristotelian three-act structure. One of the most striking aspects of the film’s structure, however, is its conformity to a central concern of much Renaissance tragedy: namely, that drama should observe the three “unities” of time, place and action. Night of the Living Dead takes place in real time (there are no forward jumps or flashbacks), bringing us an hour and a half of a group of people defending themselves from murderous zombies. This temporal continuity is quite unusual in contemporary film. Most narrative films contain cuts and take place over a few days in various locations. Night of the Living Dead, however, adheres to all three of the so-called “unities” of classical theatre, which are based (very) loosely on Aristotle’s Poetics: the unities of time, place and action. According to the rather rigid strictures of seventeenth-century dramatists like Corneille, tragic drama should not exceed 24 hours, it should not contain multiple plots and it should be set in only one location. According to this model, therefore, drama should be confined to a single action occurring in a single place and unfolding over no longer than a single day. It seems improbable that Romero was consciously trying to follow this formula himself (and undoubtedly, Romero’s decision to delimit his narrative in this way was partly determined by his limited budget). Yet Romero’s adherence to these unities is fortuitous, ensuring that its pace does not slacken (indeed, “unrelenting” is a word often employed by the film’s critics). In short, the film’s uncomplicated narrative structure produces a concentrated, taut drama, uncompromised by digressions or subplots. Like other films that observe (or nearly observe) the unities — Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth (2002) is a case in point — the pace is unflagging and the atmosphere intense. It is also instructive to consider the structure of the film in relation to the conventions of classic Hollywood narratives. As Todorov implies, narratives tend to begin with a state of equilibrium that is disrupted, and then return to a state of “equilibrium” at the end. In many 1980s horror films, for instance, the initially harmonious family unit is disrupted and eventually reunited at the end of the film. As the case of 1980s horror cinema suggests, this simple narrative structure has often been used to reinforce conservative ideologies by transforming disharmony into order (for a basic introduction to some of the issues

involved here, see Strinati, 2000: 34-39). However, this narrative structure does not necessarily lead to ideological conservatism; as Robin Wood points out, classical narrative moves towards the restoration of an order, but that nature of this order is open to question and revision:

Indeed, Romero’s film can be seen as the artistic counterpart of Raymond Williams’ argument, in his Modern Tragedy (1966), that tragedy consists not simply in the deaths of great leaders, but in the heroic and pointless destruction of “ordinary” people in their struggles for democracy.

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Whereas Slavoj Zizek’s theories about catastrophe grow out of his analysis of American responses to the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, Night of the Living Dead must be understood in relation to the impact of Vietnam on American consciousness in the 1960s. Experiences of Vietnam constitute a common subtext of American cinema from the 1960s onwards. Near the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, in a shot of Johnny and Barbra’s car entering the graveyard, we see a fluttering American flag in the foreground. The symbolism of the flag becomes clear as the film progresses: America is a dying country as a result of the zombie menace, and the flag represents the meaninglessness and deadliness of patriotism. In the post-war period, Leftist critics often pointed out the almost religious hold of patriotism in the Western world and the dangerous fervour with which patriotic ideology was upheld. Writing in the 1950s, the psychoanalyst and humanist cultural critic Erich Fromm, for example, pointed out that attacking the flag of one’s country would be an unspeakable act of sacrilege; even extreme racist and militarist views, he continued, would not be regarded with such great hostility as anti-patriotic ones (Fromm, 1963: 59). The savagery of the anti-Communist McCarthy hearings of the mid-1950s certainly vindicated Fromm’s observation. However, by the late 1960s such patriotic hegemony had been significantly contested and undermined. Romero’s film emerged at a time of strong public disapproval of the American military involvement in Vietnam, during which criticisms of patriotism — while deeply offensive to the American establishment — were becoming commonplace.

If classical narrative moves toward the restoration of an order, must this be the patriarchal status quo? Is this tendency not due to the constraints imposed by our culture rather than to constraints inherent within the narrative itself? Does the possibility not exist of narrative moving toward the establishment of a different order, or, quite simply, toward irreparable and irreversible breakdown (which would leave the reader/viewer the options of despair or the task of imagining alternatives)?

Wood’s comments are highly relevant to the conclusion of Night of the Living Dead. On a purely formal level, the “equilibrium” model describes the structure of the film; Romero, however, gives this narrative structure a twist, undermining the apparent “return to order” at the end of the film. On a superficial level, narrative equilibrium is restored in the final scene by the state troopers who, in keeping with their usual diegetic function in thriller and horror film, reinstate order and authority. Yet the audience knows that this apparent “order” has been achieved at the cost of Ben’s life and has involved a heinous violation of social justice. In this sense, Night of the Living Dead anticipates the pessimistic horror cinema of the 1970s, in which legitimate authority is seen to be impotent in the face of evil (Crane, 2002: 169). Yet, while despair is one possible response to such endings, the shocking bathos of Night of the Living Dead challenges the audience to imagine more positive alternative endings. Apocalypse Then: Romero’s Catastrophic Vision in Context

Closely related to concerns about the consequences of militarism (and about Vietnam in particular) are fears about the potential for Western society to be devastated by nuclear holocaust. The wretched condition of Romero’s zombies resounds with popular fantasies about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on America — a widespread anxiety underpinning American postwar cinema (other films attesting to this fear include Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes, which was also released in 1968). The film may also represent another type of apocalypse: that of religious doomsday. Many fundamentalist Christians in America and elsewhere believe that the dead shall be raised to life on “the last day’:

Night of the Living Dead is a film about apocalypse. American films are very often apocalypse or disaster movies, and there are many theories about why this is so. The cultural critic Slavoj Zizek (2002a) points out that Americans have a deep psychological attachment to images of catastrophe. This constant anxiety about catastrophe shows just how concerned America is about radical social change and indicates, he argues, just how concerned America is to preserve the status quo. While many mainstream American films concern some kind of catastrophe, however, Night of the Living Dead does not offer the happy narrative closure expected of the Hollywood disaster movie. Instead, Romero’s presents a tragedy in which the hero dies, rather than saves the world. Romero’s tragic vision is quite unusual in an American culture which, according to the critic Terry Eagleton (2003), has been rendered “anti-tragic” by the forces of relativism and voluntarism. This tragic vision has a political colouring in Night of the Living Dead.

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Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable. . . (King James Version, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52)

Romero’s zombies, according to this interpretation, might be seen as the resurrected on Judgement Day: indeed, like their biblical counterparts, they are mute. Clearly, it is possible to read many versions of apocalypse into the film. Perhaps the zombies represent, in Freudian terms, the “return of the repressed” — those sublimated aspects of ourselves that we hide from public view. Perhaps they are to be equated with the Russians — often conceived by Americans at the time as a barbaric throng, intent on destroying (devouring) the American way of life. Perhaps the zombies represent the younger generation of Americans which, as it seemed to many in the late 1960s, wanted to overthrow traditions and replace them with a new social order. Or perhaps, from a more recent perspective, the zombies could be seen to represent the homeless, AIDS sufferers, drug users, or any other marginalized group (Tom Savini’s 1990 remake of the film makes the drug-user metaphor explicit). Clearly, some of these interpretations may have been intended by Romero, while others were not: but all of them are valid. It is true that the film does offer a kind of B-movie scientific explanation of what is happening: radiation from outer space. However, Romero does not posit this “explanation” as the only correct interpretation of the apocalypse; instead, he prefers to let the audience determine the meaning of his metaphor. Horror films are, to borrow a term from the Italian theorist Umberto Eco, “open works,” texts that allow a high degree of interpretative ambiguity. Eco argues that such texts are the most appropriate type of text in our own time, because they reflect the sense of disorder and discontinuity that are such marked features of the modern world (Eco, 1989). In every era, the Night of the Living Dead audience will attach its own meanings to the zombies. Romero is more interested in allowing his metaphor to work subtly yet powerfully at the heart of his film. Romero’s primary interest is not in providing a detailed explanation of the disaster that has befallen America, so much as in analysing the human response to it. Communication, Alienation, and Isolation Night of the Living Dead constitutes a dramatic appeal for communication and cooperation in the face of paranoia and violence. Romero’s interest in communication resembles that of the British dramatist Harold Pinter. Like Pinter, Romero explores interpersonal communication through dialogue, focusing on the ways in which our preconceptions of others make us suspicious and even hostile towards them, and the lies we tell to ourselves and to others. As with Pinter, the dialogue demands scrupulous attention. Careful listeners will have noticed that when Barbra first speaks to Ben, she is not entirely honest about her relationship with Johnny: she tells him that she was “with Johnny,” implying that Johnny is her partner. This suggests Barbra’s uncertainty regarding the intentions of her interlocutor, perhaps because he is a man, perhaps because he is black? Barbra also misleadingly talks about her brother is if he were

still alive, even though the audience knows that he is dead. Barbra’s denial of her brother’s death can be understood as an unconscious psychological survival strategy. The character of Harry Cooper, however, tells lies deliberately in order to cover his cowardice. Early in the film he tells Barbra and Ben that when he was in the basement, he hadn’t heard the others enter the house; later, however, he lets slip that he had, in fact, heard the commotion above. The film also raises questions about the role of the media and the role of mass communication. The media is omnipresent. Early in the film, there is a lengthy scene in which Ben and Barbra don’t speak, but listen to the radio — a fairly fruitless activity adumbrating Romero’s concern in his later films with the banality of media culture (Blake, 2002: 157-61). Later on, a television is discovered upstairs in the house and is fought over by Ben and Harry Cooper. There is irony here: Ben and Harry fight over the only means of communication with the outside world, but are unable to communicate with each other. Through such ironies, the film incessantly poses the question: who is the enemy? At first it seems obvious that it is the zombies; later, however, as the paranoid human beings fight among themselves, the distinction between human beings and zombies becomes blurred. The point is reinforced by Zizek: “The division friend/ enemy is never just a recognition of factual difference. The enemy is by definition always (up to a point) invisible: it cannot be directly recognized because it looks like one of us.” (Zizek, 2002b: 5). In the final scene of the film, the difficulty of enemy recognition is horrifically exemplified when Ben is shot dead after he is misrecognised (seemingly) as a zombie (a scene which to an American audience in the 1960s must surely have resonated with the murder of the black rights leader Martin Luther King). Romero himself has emphasised that his zombie films, in particular, dramatize failures of human co-operation. Cooper’s initial intention is to board up his family in the basement and thus isolate them. In historical terms, this impulse is understandable. During the cold war, the instinct to hide in the basement was the response of many people to the threat of a nuclear attack (the Cooper family are the “nuclear” family in every sense). But Cooper’s actions also symbolize the human tendency towards solipsism and isolationism. There are echoes of this selfish impulse in contemporary American separatist militia and other isolationist groups, who often believe that they can escape what they perceive as the madness of the world around them by sequestering themselves in the forests or mountains. Even in the “mainstream” of Western societies, we find similar attitudes that are bound up with an individualistic, bourgeois mode of existence — isolated from the local community and living alongside others without ever communicating with them. Romero’s message is therefore implicitly a call for co-operation: if we allow the world fall apart around us, Romero implies, the destruction will sooner or later destroy our own lives.

Again, this message needs to be located in a historical context. In post-war America, and in the West in general, many middle class people were starting to live more prosperous, but more isolated lives; however, the apparent ease and security of such lives carried dangers of alienation: a safe home quickly becomes prison-like. In the 1960s and 1970s progressive criticism of the bourgeois conception of the family reached its height. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote at the end of her life: ××

its racial significance. Night of the Living Dead is set at a time of racial upheaval and protest in America. Black people had been given faith in the possibility of the betterment of their conditions. With the death of Martin Luther King, however, many people lost this faith and abandoned the idea of peaceful resistance. White and black militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation sprang up (mentioning these groups together does not, incidentally, imply a moral equivalence between them). To many people, it seemed as though there might be a race war in America. Conservative, reactionary discussions of this possibility often focused — as they sometimes do today — on the possibility that “we” might soon be outnumbered by “them.” The line in Night of the Living Dead “we don’t know how many of them there are” highlights this racist concern with numbers and the fear of being outnumbered or “swamped.” This fear was not restricted to America; 1968 was also the year of British Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, which predicted bloody racial conflict in the United Kingdom Powell was duly sacked for his comments by the party leader Edward Heath.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation. (Margaret Mead, New Realities, June 1978)

In the film, the collapse of the bourgeois domestic family is symbolised when Karen Cooper becomes a zombie and kills her parents. Thus the ending of Night of the Living Dead contrasts quite markedly with the more conservative endings of many horror films, where the restoration of family values is seen as the answer to social problems. “Beat ’em or burn ’em”: Race and Power

Of course, Night of the Living Dead is not the only film of its time to deal with issues of race. In Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? (1967) Sidney Poitier played a black man engaged to a white woman; the film details the reactions of each partner’s family to the interracial marriage. In that film, however, racial issues were dealt with in a quite explicit way — they were the focus of the film. In Night of the Living Dead, on the other hand, racial tensions are not explicitly mentioned, making them, paradoxically, all the more evident. By casting a black man as a hero, Romero, the independent filmmaker, implicitly rejected the values of Hollywood, which at that time typically eschewed black heroes. In recent years, we have become accustomed to visible minorities playing the “virtuous” characters in films (in fact, some critics now believe that this has in itself become another form of racist misrepresentation: after all, if visible minorities are always the “good guys,” doesn’t this imply a lack of confidence in portraying them as fully-rounded human beings?). In 1968, however, the novelty of a black hero was striking.

To those unfamiliar the zombie movie genre, it might seem hard to see how a film like Night of the Living Dead could be regarded as a political film. However, the film is one of the most important cultural records of its era. Romero himself has explicitly commented that the film is a document of contemporary social changes. We don’t have to take the director’s word for this, since the film’s political themes are hardly hidden from the audience. But why should a film about zombies be considered as a film about race? One reason lies in Romero’s selection of zombies as the film’s monsters of choice. Why zombies, as opposed to vampires or dragons or giant beetles? It is important to remember the zombie’s origin in the voodoo tradition in Haiti (indeed, the phenomenon is taken so seriously in Haiti that the country’s Penal Code considers making someone into a zombie as a form of murder). According to the belief, Haitian zombies lack free will and perhaps souls. They become zombified by a “bokor” (sorcerer) through spell or potion, and are afterwards used as slaves. It is this connection with slavery that allows us to equate zombies with people of colour. This is not an entirely new conception. Two years before Romero’s film, for example, the link between zombies and slaves had been used in John Gilling’s British zombie film for the Hammer Studios, The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Set in a Cornwall, an evil squire uses black magic to turn his villagers into zombies and exploit their labour in his dangerously unsafe tin mine. Thus the zombie is a metaphor for, in Gilling’s film, the exploited working class, and in Romero’s film for the oppressed racial minorities of America.

While racial issues are not explicitly foregrounded in the film, the dialogue makes continual reference to the ways in which racial minorities have been treated in the past in America. The redneck hostility of this language here is reflected in later films about racial hatred in America, such as Alan Parker’s 1988 film Mississippi Burning. Finally, the way in which the zombies are hung from trees in the final scenes of the film inevitably invokes the racist lynchings of America’s past. Men, Women, and Tablecloths: Gender Stereotypes

The film’s immediate social context further suggests

The film also contains a deeply committed exploration of gender roles. Throughout the film, only the men seem to be effective in combating the zombies. While Ben and the other men are active, Barbra is catatonic. Once inside the house and safely in the care of the film’s black hero, Ben, Barbra is quickly reduced to helpless catatonia. She sits on the living room sofa for almost the entire duration of the film, until she is finally moved to action at the sight of Helen Cooper being attacked by zombies. In fact, Barbra is both infantilised (while Ben boards up the house, she toys with a musical box, suggesting that she is “regressing,” in the Freudian sense) and identified with household items, such as the linen tablecloth and the embroidered arm of the sofa which she obsessively strokes. In other words, while the men act, the women — Barbra in particular — draw comfort from domestic goods. There is also an imbalance in the types of role adopted by each sex. Helen and Judy undertake the “women’s work” of caring for the injured Karen Cooper, while the men set about the more pressing business of boarding up the house against the undead. Although Helen Cooper is relatively active (and resistant to the orders of her bullying husband Harry) and although Barbra eventually attempts to rescue Helen in a belated gesture of sisterhood, the women in the film generally constitute a kind of backdrop, their feelings and actions largely dependent on the more capable males.

women are presented as completely non-racist; indeed, their non-complicity with racist sentiments accords all too neatly with stereotypes of feminine perfection. However, Barbra’s clear mistrust of Ben — she positions the knife on the fridge ambiguously, so that the audience is unsure whether she wishes to use it against the zombies or against Ben — suggests that, for all her docile domesticity, she has been affected by the racism of the world outside (Lightning, 2000). Barbra, after all, is not perfect. Violence: from the “Gratuitous” to the Metaphorical British film director Nicholas Roeg once quipped that “there are three lovely critical expressions … pretentious, gratuitous and profound, none of which I truly understand.” Roeg’s remark indicates that film critics often reach for such expressions as summary (yet unexplained) insults. Indeed, while few critics are concerned, it appears, about the filmic representation of gratuitous love or gratuitous friendship, many critics express anxiety about so-called “gratuitous” violence. Night of the Living Dead is a violent film, although by contemporary Hollywood standards, the number of violent acts is actually rather low. This violence is problematic — not because violence is always or inherently problematic, but because its representation has become problematic in Western society for a number of cultural reasons. Some elements of British audiences, for example, have adopted a critical attitude towards film violence by the campaigns of Mary Whitehouse’s Viewer’s and Listener’s Association and other right wing pressure groups. Their arguments often assume (rather questionably) that fiction should depict only those things which we wish to see in real life and (equally questionably) that the fictional representation of violent acts leads to violent behaviour. These arguments have a long history, however. In the Renaissance, for example, violence violated the rules of “decorum” (i.e. violence was “unseemly”). Violent incidents in plays, for example, were merely reported rather than enacted on stage. Until fairly recently, violence was not often depicted in art. Even early horror films, such as Nosferatu (1919), did not depict violent acts to the same extent as Night of the Living Dead. In relation to film, in particular, regulation and censorship of movies through the Hays Production Code made film violence rare until the 1960s.

The passivity of the women in Night is problematic for some feminist critics. Gregory A. Waller, for example, notes that Barbra’s character “would seem to support certain sexist assumptions about female passivity, irrationality, and emotional vulnerability” (1986: 283). This stereotype of the catatonic blonde was common in the cinema of the 1960s. It can be seen, for example, in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1964), which is widely described as a study of feminine repression and insanity. In Repulsion, Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is accosted by various more-or-less lecherous or downright vicious men, eventually suffering from frightening hallucinations and becoming a murderer. However horrifying her acts may be, it is difficult to hold her responsible for her actions (she is clearly extremely mentally disturbed); on the contrary, the film forces us to consider the impact on women of patriarchal oppression. There is a risk here of using patriarchal oppression to explain away all problematic representations of women; yet when that context is clear in the filmic text, it can excuse representations of women that might in other contexts seem sexist. Indeed, just as Carol’s violence is at least partially understandable as a response to her oppression (and not simply her repression), we can excuse the extreme passivity of the women in Night of the Living Dead on the grounds that they are not only intimidated by the men (or, at least, by some of the men), but also conditioned to act as passive domestic drudges.

However, such rules about the representation of violence were made to be broken: even in the Renaissance, dramatists like Shakespeare sometimes violated the “rules” of decorum by depicting violence in their plays (in King Lear, for example, Cornwall blinds Gloucester onstage). In relation to film, the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s led to the abandonment of the Production Code, allowing films to be released with a minimum of censorship. But is there any justification for dramatic depictions of violence? If we are concerned with

Moreover, if we consider Barbra’s attitude towards Ben, there is a sense in which Romero’s presentation of women is progressive. In many films about race,

the representation of power relations in society, then the answer is surely yes. In his book Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske writes: ××

his zombie films in order to highlight current social injustices. Indeed there is in the film a sense of documentary-like verisimilitude, especially in the grainy photographic images of the zombie cull at the end of the film, which recall contemporary photographs of the carnage in Vietnam.

It is not violence per se that characterises popular culture, but only that violence whose structure makes it into a metaphor for the distribution of power in society. (Fiske, 1989: 137)

What is interesting is the way in which our attitudes towards violence change throughout the film. After a while we become inured to the shock of seeing the zombies being killed. As the film progresses, the zombies become an undifferentiated mass — as enemies so easily become. As the violence increases, we begin to lose our sense that the zombies are in any way human and tend to become (to use a cliché) “desensitised” to the violence we see (recalling Joseph Stalin’s chilling observation that “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic’). However, Romero never allows us to feel fully comfortable with this — and the ending of the film offers the stark admonition that in our zeal to eradicate our enemies, we risk destroying ourselves.

According to Fiske, then, violence is a metaphor for inequitable (and presumably unjust) power relations in society. It is important, however, to understand this point in historical context. Violence became more commonly depicted in films and on television in the late 1960s, during a socially turbulent period when social hierarchies were being challenged. To many people, the violence of the later 1960s and 1970s seemed arbitrary. In 1966 a twenty-five-year old parttime graduate student in architectural engineering positioned himself in an observation tower on the Austin campus of the University of Texas, shooting forty-four people, and killing fourteen of them. In their book Images of Madness, the critics Fleming and Manvell write: ××

Conclusion: Night of the Living Dead — An Undead Classic? Presenting, as I have done, Romero as a social critic, incurs a risk of underestimating his wry wit. While the tone of the film is sombre (there is more humour in the film’s sequel Dawn of the Dead), there are also many strongly humorous elements. Often there is a kind of cartoonish quality, for example, about some of the characters. Frustrated by his own incompetence, Cooper does exactly what Moe from the Three Stooges would have done: he complains and lashes out angrily at those around him, blaming them for his own inability to function. In a sense, therefore, Cooper is a stereotypical buffoon, infuriatingly impervious to criticism in a way that leavens his (to borrow a phrase from Theodore Adorno) “authoritarian” personality. There are also elements of black humour in the names of the characters. Mr Cooper, significantly, wants to “coup” his family up in the basement; Ben’s name, meaning “good” in Latin, is consistent with his role as the moral touchstone of the film. Despite this humour, however, Night of the Living Dead, as I shall argue more strongly below, remains a deeply serious film in terms of its social import.

It was but one of a number of multiple murders that came at a time when mass violence appeared to be erupting throughout America and was coming to be accepted as commonplace. It was this arbitrary and violent quality in murder that became the subject of two box-office successes of the period, Bonnie and Clyde(1967) and In Cold Blood (1968) (Fleming and Manvell, 1985: 103)

Indeed, from the late 1960s, police series became more fast-paced and violent, while so-called “spaghetti Westerns” challenged the conventional bloodlessness of conventional Westerns by showing the gory reality of violence. Spaghetti Westerns also challenged the enduring Western myth that the strong and the virtuous will prevail; instead they showed that even the good get hurt — a message reinforced in Night of the Living Dead. Yet these representations of violence cannot simply be seen as “arbitrary” or “gratuitous.” As Alan Clarke writes about the violent police dramas of the 1970s: “much of the violence was completely gratuitous unless it was seen as the necessary background to the war against crime which the police were fighting. This more explicit portrayal had gained a symbolic value” (Clarke, 1986: 220).

To some extent, the continuing power of Romero’s film can be seen in terms of its subsequent cinematic influence. Night of the Living Dead draws on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), especially in its film craft: the use of shadow and camera angles. But it in turn has influenced many other films, most notably the opening sequence of Salva’s Jeeper’s Creepers (2001), which draws on both Night of the Living Dead (particularly in the scene in which a brother and a sister argue in a car on a winding, deserted road) and the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn (1978) (in which a couple listen to fundamentalist radio stations as they drive through the rural environment). The boarding up of

In light of the above comments by Fiske and Clarke, the violence in Romero’s film can be viewed as metaphorical — it stands for the interracial violence of 1960s America and for the horrors of the Vietnam war that were so shockingly revealed on American television screens in the late 1960s. In a certain sense, then, the violence of the film may be seen as “realistic’; that is, it reflects and comments upon the violence of the period in which the film was made. Violence is a theme Romero has worked with in all of

the farmhouse has precursors in Western films, such as John Huston’s The Unforgiven (1960), from which the settlers fight off the marauding Indians (intriguingly, The Unforgiven‘s hero is also called Ben) and is often been repeated, as in M. Night Shayamalan’s Signs (2002). The image of zombies climbing in through windows to devour human flesh, meanwhile, has become a pop culture icon, referenced in such disparate places as John Carpenter’s seminal film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), or the more recent British films such as 28 Days Later(2002). To invoke some even more populist contexts, the names of popular music bands, the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the best-selling Playstation game series “Resident Evil” and the television comedy series Father Ted have all drawn on Romero’s iconography. After forty years, the diffuse and all-pervasive influence of Night of the Living Dead is makes it difficult precisely to assess its overall cultural impact. Turning to the films mentioned at the start of this essay, it can be seen that while several of the recent zombie films that make reference toNight of the Living Dead may have interesting qualities, their ideological implications differ markedly from those of Romero’s film. The Resident Evil films (Anderson, 2002; Witt, 2004) are marred by their treatment of women as sexual spectacles, while the comic parody of Shaun of the Dead (2004) seems hollow, as there is never a sense of menace or of any human value being at stake. Perhaps 28 Days Later (2002) and Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) are the most intriguing of these films, although their gender politics are suspect (Harper, 2005). There are, of course, dangers in designating Night of the Living Dead, or any film, as a “great” or “seminal” film, whose lofty social conscience recent zombie cinema has basely traduced. Nevertheless, none of the recent spawn of zombie films offers the ambiguity, artistry, and radical import of Romero’s film. Night of the Living Dead (and, indeed, its worthy sequels) reminds us of something that the recent outbreak of zombie films may have caused us to forget: the oppositional potential of popular culture. In this sense, the film is an undead classic that can still tell us something about who we are — and warn us about what we might turn into.

Jaws

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget Box office

Steven Spielberg Richard D Zanuck, David Brown Peter Benchleym Carl Gottlieb Jaws by Peter Benchley June 20, 1975 124 minutes $9 million $470.7 million

I was in kindergarten in 1975, and I’ll never forget that one of my best friends came to school that Halloween costumed as the great white shark from Jaws (1975). I don’t remember what I was wearing for the holiday, but I remember that shark costume plain as day.

the great white shark proves resourceful, powerful, smart...and committed to their destruction. Jaws derives much of its terror from what you might half-jokingly term “information overload.” Although the great white shark remains hidden beneath the waves for most of the film -- unseen but imagined -Steven Spielberg fills in that visual gap (and the viewer’s imagination) with a plethora of facts and figures about this ancient, deadly predator.

Jaws was also a subject of discussion at Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house in Verona, N.J., that year, especially with my aunt Vivian (a horror movie devotee...). I even owned a goofy little Jaws-themed paperback joke book (dopey shark joke after dopey shark joke...) and a Jaws game from Ideal (in which you could fish the blue plastic contents out of the great white shark’s stomach before his fanged jaws snapped shut on your hand.)

Legendarily, the life-size mechanical model of the shark (named Bruce) malfunctioned repeatedly during production of the film, a reality which forced Spielberg to hide the creature from the camera for much of the time. Yet this problem actually worked out in the film’s best interest. Because for much of the first two acts, unrelenting tension builds as a stream of data about the “monster” washes over us. It’s the education of Martin Brody, and the education of Jaws’ audience.

As someone who lived through that time and soaked it all up, I can tell you with certainty that the Steven Spielberg film represented an absolute national sensation from the movie theaters to book stores, to toy shelves, to playgrounds. My parents didn’t let me see the movie at that point (a good thing, I estimate...), but many of my friends in kindergarten did see it (and heck, it was rated PG!).

After a close-up shot of a typewriter clacking out the words “SHARK ATTACK (all caps), images, illustrations and descriptions of the shark start to hurtle across the screen in ever increasing numbers. Chief Brody reads from a book that shows a mythological-style rendering of a shark as a boat-destroying, ferocious sea monster.

Jaws was a blockbuster in 1975, all right (actually, it supplanted The Exorcist as the highest grossing film of all time...), but it’s also a movie that has survived the test of time. Today, you can find Jaws on AFI’s list of the greatest American films in history, for instance. It has been termed “culturally significant” by the U.S. Library of Congress and preserved in the National Film Registry. Spielberg’s horror epic even swims in the waters of the top 250 movies at the IMDB. In terms of the pop culture, Jaws has inspired sequels, rip-offs, amusement park rides, video games, and heavily influenced the public’s perception of sharks.

Another schematic in the same scene reveals a graph of shark “radar,” the fashion by which the shark senses a “distressed” fish (the prey...) far away in the water. Additional photos in the book -- and shown fullscreen by Spielberg -- depict the damage a shark can inflict: victims of shark bites both living and dead. These are not photos made up for the film, incidentally, but authentic photographs of real-life shark attack victims.

Amazingly, Jaws remains as potent and frightening a film today -- some thirty-four years after its theatrical release -- and accordingly, I want to look at some of the reasons why the film remains so scary and so effective. But first, a brief refresher on the film’s narrative.

Why, there’s even a “gallows” humor drawing of a shark (with a human inside its giant maw...) drawn by Quint at one point, a “cartoon” version of our learning.

Based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws depicts the story of a small island community, a “summer town” called Amity, as it is bedeviled by the arrival of a rogue great white shark in its silver waters. Under pressure from the concerned town elders because the lucrative July 4th weekend is imperiled, Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) covers-up the first shark attack and allows Amity’s beaches to remain open.

Taken together, these various images cover all aspects of shark-dom: from reputation and lore to ability, to their impact on soft human flesh, to the macabre and ghastly. The information about sharks also comes to Brody (the audience surrogate) in other ways, through both complementary pieces of his heroic triumvirate, Hooper and Quint, respectively. The young, enthusiastic, secular Hooper first becomes conveyor of data in his capacity as a scientist.

After a second shark attack claims the life of a child, Alex Kintner, Brody faces the animosity of the very citizens he is sworn to protect. Eventually, Brody, a young marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and a colorful local fisherman, Quint (Robert Shaw) team up aboard the ship Orca to battle the shark at sea. Unfortunately for these heroic men,

Hooper arrives in Amity and promptly performs an autopsy on shark attack victim Chrissie Watkins. He records the examination aloud, into a tape recorder mic (while Brody listens). Hooper’s vocal survey

of the extensive wounds on the corpse permits the audience to learn precisely what occurred when this girl was attacked and partially devoured by a great white shark. Hooper speaks in clinical, scientific terms of something utterly grotesque: “The torso has been severed in mid-thorax; there are no major organs remaining...right arm has been severed above the elbow with massive tissue loss in the upper musculature... partially denuded bone remaining...” As Brody’s science teacher of sorts, Hooper later leads the chief through a disgusting (and wet...) dissection of a dead tiger shark (one captured and thought to be the Amity offender). Again, Hooper educates not just Brody; he educates the audience about a shark’s eating habits and patterns. All these facts -- like those presented by illustrations in books -- register powerfully with the viewer and we begin to understand what kind of “monster” these men face.

a prepared audience is a worried one. We also become invested in Brody as our lead because we learn, alongside him, all these things. When he beats the shark, we feel as if we’ve been a part of the victory. Another clever bit here: after all the “education” and “knowledge” and “information,” Spielberg harks back to the mythological aspect of sea monsters, hinting that this is no ordinary shark, but a real survivor -- a monster -- and possibly even supernatural in nature (like Michael Myers from Halloween). Consider that this sea dragon arrives in Amity (and comes for Quint?) thirty years to the day of the Indianapolis incident (which occurred June 30, 1945). Given this anniversary, one must consider the idea that the shark could be more than mere animal. It could, in fact, be some kind of supernatural angel of death.

Later, aboard the Orca, Quint completes Brody’s learning curve about sharks with the final piece of the equation: first-hand experience. Quint recounts, in a captivating sequence, how he served aboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis in 1945. How the ship was sunk (after delivering the Hiroshima bomb), and how 1100 American sailors found themselves in shark-infested water for days on end.

Thematically, the shark could also serve as a Freudian symptom of guilt repressed in the American psyche. The shark attack on Indianapolis occurred thirty years earlier, at the end of World War II, when a devastating weapon was deployed by the United states. Now, in 1975, this shark arrives on the home front just scant months after the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War (April 30, 1975) -- think of the images of American helicopters dropped off aircraft carriers into the sea. This shark nearly kills a young man, Hooper, who would have likely been the same age as Quint when he served in the navy during World War II.

Over a thousand sailors went into the water and only approximately three-hundred came out. As Quint relates: “the idea was: shark comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the shark go away... but sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a shark... he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin’ and the hollerin’, they all come in and they... rip you to pieces.”

Does the shark represent some form of natural blow back against American foreign policy overseas? I would say this is over-reach, a far-fetched notion if not for the fact that the shark’s assault on the whitepicket fences of Amity strikes us right where it hurts: in the wallet; devastating the economy. It isn’t just a few people who are made to suffer, but everyone in the community. And that leads us directly to an understanding of the context behind Jaws. It Was Only Local Jurisdiction

This testimony about an eyewitness account is not the only “history” lesson for Brody, either. Brief reference is also made in the film to the real-life “Jersey maneater” incident of July 1 - July 12, 1916, in which four summer swimmers were attacked by a shark on the New Jersey coast.

President Nixon resigned from the White House on August 9, 1974...scarcely a year before the release of Jaws. He did so because he faced Impeachment and removal from office in the Watergate scandal, a benign-sounding umbrella for a plethora of crimes that included breaking-and-entering, political espionage, illegal wire-tapping, and money laundering.

This “information overload” concerning sharks -from mythology and scientific facts to history and nightmarish first-person testimony -- builds up the threat of the film’s villain to an extreme level, while the actual beast remains silent, unseen. When the shark does wage its final attack, the audience has been rigorously prepared and it feels frightened almost reflexively. Spielberg’s greatest asset here is that he has created, from scratch, an educated audience; one who fully appreciates the threat of the great white shark. A smart audience is a prepared audience. And

It was clear to the American people, who had watched the Watergate hearings and investigations on television for years, that Nixon and his lackeys had broken the law, to the detriment of the public covenant. It was a breach of the sacred trust, and a collapse of one pillar of American nationalism: faith in government.

In the small town of Amity in Jaws, the Watergate scandal is played out in microcosm. Chief Brody conspires with the town medical examiner, at the behest of Larry Vaughn, the mayor, to “hide” the truth about the shark attack that claimed the life of young Chrissie. Another child dies because of this lie. We are thus treated to scenes of Brody and the town officials hounded by the press (represented by Peter Benchley...), much as Nixon felt hounded by Woodward and Bernstein and the rest. We are thus treating to a town council meeting which plays like a congressional Watergate hearing writ small, with a row of politicians at a long time before an angry crowd, the man in charge banging the gavel helplessly.

This introduction to the world of Jaws -- which features a teenager going out for a swim in the ocean and getting the surprise of her life - proves pitch perfect both in orchestration and effect. Hyperbole aside, can you think of a better (or more famous) horror movie prologue than the one featured here? The film begins under the sea as Spielberg’s camera adopts the P.O.V. of the shark itself. We cling to the bottom of the ocean, just skirting it as we move inland. Then, we cut to the beach, and a long, lackadaisical establishing pan across a typical teenage party. Young people are smoking weed, drinking, canoodling... doing what young people do on summer nights, and Spielberg’s choice of shot captures that vibe.

These were images that had immediate and powerful resonance at the time of Jaws.

When one of the group -- the blond-haired seventies goddess named Chrissie -- gets up to leave the bunch, Spielberg cuts abruptly to a high angle (from a few feet away); a view that we understand signifies doom and danger, and which serves to distance us just a little from the individuals on-screen.

If you combine the “keep the beaches open” conspiracy with the Indianapolis story (a story, essentially, of an impotent, abandoned military) what you get in Jaws is a story about America’s 1970s “crisis of confidence,” to adopt a phrase from ex-president Jimmy Carter.

With a horny (but drunk...) companion in tow, Chrissie rapidly disrobes for a night-time dip in the sea, and Spielberg cuts to an angle far below her, from the bottom of the ocean looking up. We see Chrissie’s beautiful nude form cutting the surface above, and the first thing you might think of is another monster movie, Jack Arnold’s Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954). Remember how the creature there spied lovely Julie Adams in the water...even stopping to dance with her (without her knowledge) in the murky lagoon?

Following Watergate, following Vietnam, there was no faith in elected leaders, and Jaws mirrors that reality with an unforgiving depiction of craven politicians and bureaucrats. The cure is also provided, however: the heroism of the individual; the old legend of the cowboy who rides into town and seeks justice. Brody is clearly that figure here: an outsider in the corrupt town of Amity (he’s from the NYPD); and the man who rides out onto the sea to face Amity’s enemy head on, despite his own fear of the sea and “drowning.” Yes Brody was involved in the cover-up, but Americans don’t like their heroes too neat. Brody must have a little blood on his hands so that his story of heroism is also one of redemption.

Well, that was an image, perhaps, out of a more romantic age. In this case, the swimmer is nude, not garbed, and contact with the monster is quick and fatal, not the beginning of any sort of “relationship.” In a horrifying close-shot, we see Chrissie break the surface, as something unseen but immensely powerful tugs at her from below. Once. Then again. After an instant, you realize the shark is actually eating her... ripping through her legs and torso. She begs God for help, but as you might expect in the secular 1970s, there is no help for her.

Why is Jaws so enduring and appealing? Simple answer: it’s positively archetypal in its presentation of both the monster -- a sea-going dragon ascribed supernatural power -- and it’s hero: an everyman who challenges city hall and saves the townsfolk. This hero is ably supported by energetic youth and up-to-date science (Hooper), and also wisdom and experience in the form of the veteran Quint. Not coincidentally, many of the political problems that Jaws deals with (a lost war; a presidential scandal) are things we still see on our landscape today. A president who broke the Geneva Conventions. Another foreign war botched. An economy seemingly hanging on by a thread. In fact, Jaws seems pretty much of the moment, if you take out the 1970s fashions.

The extremely unnerving aspect of Spielberg’s execution is that recognition of the shark’s attack dawns on the audience as the same time it dawns on Chrissie. She doesn’t even realize a leg is gone, at first. It’s horrifying, but -- in the best tradition of the genre -- this scene is also oddly beautiful. The gorgeous sea; the lovely human form. The night-time lighting. Everything about this moment should be romantic and wonderful, but isn’t. Again, you can detect how Spielberg is taking the malaise days mood of the nation to generate his aura of terror; his overturning of the traditional order. Just as our belief in ourselves as a “good” and powerful nation was overturned by Vietnam and Watergate.

You’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat You can’t truly have an adequate discussion of Jaws without some mention of film technique. The film’s first scene exemplifies Spielberg’s intelligent, visual approach to the thrilling material.

The more puritanical or conservative among us will also recognize this inaugural scene of Jaws as being an early corollary of the “vice precedes slice and dice” dynamic of many a slasher or Friday the 13th film. A young couple, eager to have pre-marital sex (after smoking weed, no less...) faces a surprise “monster” in a foreign realm. Here not in the woods of Crystal Lake, but in a sea of secrets and monsters. It’s also no coincidence, I believe, that the first victim in the film is a gorgeous, athletic blond with a perfect figure. Chrissie is the American Ideal of Beauty...torn asunder and devoured before the movie proper has even begun. If that image doesn’t unsettle you, nothing will. I wrote in my book, Horror Films of the 1970s (McFarland; 2002), that, ultimately the characteristics that make a film great go far beyond any rudimentary combination of acting, photography, editing and music. It’s a magic equation that some films get right and some don’t. Jaws is a classic, I believe, because it educates the viewer about the central diabolical threat and then surprises the viewer by going a step further and hinting that the great white shark is no mere animal, but actually an ancient, malovelent force. The film also brilliantly reflects the issues of the age in which it was created. And finally, Jaws updates the archetypes of good and evil that generations of Americans have grown up recounting, even though it does so with a distinctly disco decade twist. The Hooper-Brody-Quint troika is iconic too, and I love the male-bonding aspects of the film, with “modern” men like Brody and Hooper learning, eventually, to fall in love, after a fashion, with the inappropriate, Quint...warts and all. Finally, you should never underestimate that Jaws depends on imagination and mystery. It is set on the sea, a murky realm of the unknown where the shark boasts the home field davantage. Meanwhile, man is awkward and endangered there. We can’t see the shark...but he can see us. With those black, devil eyes. When you suddenly realize that all that’s standing between Brody and those black eyes and jaws is a thin layer of wood (the Orca); when you think about all the information we’ve been given about great whites and their deadly qualities, you’ll agree reflexively instinctively -- with the good chief ’s prognosis. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

The Evil Dead

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Sam Raimi Rober t Taper t Sam Raimi October 15, 1981 85 minutes $400,000 $2.6 million

We’re not the only souls excited about the Halloween premiere of Starz’s Ash Vs Evil Dead. Millions of fans have been clamoring for a sequel forever, and all that waiting has paid off, as they’re not just getting a 90-minute film but a 10-episode season (with one more to follow next year). To celebrate, writer David Konow is paying tribute to the one that started it all.

comedies before, we weren’t really sure he would pull off a horror film,” Sullivan says. “But I had confidence in him because the kid was so gung-ho about everything. He studied film at an amazing level.” In the spring of 1978, Raimi and co. shot a 32-minute film, Within the Woods, on Super 8 for $1,600. It was during the making of the short that Raimi developed the “shaki-cam” effect. Instead of creating an ultra-smooth traveling camera shot, the shaki-cam showed the force and energy of the evil spirit speeding through the woods, and it became one of the trademarks of the Dead series.

When The Evil Dead was first released in 1981, it was a breath of fresh air for horror fans. The genre had been stuck in a mad-slasher rut, and here was an original horror flick that wonderfully showcased the low-budget ingenuity of Sam Raimi. No less than Stephen King called it “the most ferociously original horror film of the year,” and with that anointment, a new classic of terror was born.

Showing Within the Woods around as a demo film, Raimi and producer Rob Tapert’s Renaissance Pictures managed to raise $85,000 from a group of investors, and The Evil Dead finally began shooting in the woods of Tennessee in the winter of 1979. Raimi was hoping the weather would be warmer in the south, but it turned out to be Tennessee’s coldest weather in decades.

The inspiration for The Evil Dead grew out of the drive-in era of the late seventies. John Carpenter’s Halloween was a low-budget indie phenomenon that cost $300,000 and made back $47 million domestically, which would be about $150 million today, clearly a huge return on its investment.

The Evil Dead shoot was an intense, fly-by-the-seatof-your-pants experience. “Sam pretty much tested all of us on just what the limits of our own stamina were,” says Josh Becker, who worked second unit on the film. “Every day was 18 to 20 hours. Quite frankly, I thought Sam had lost his mind. I can’t believe I went through it.”

“At the time, there were drive-ins all over the country,” says Tom Sullivan, who was responsible for The Evil Dead’s make-up and FX. “There were triple features every week, and there was a huge demand for movies. The audiences were teenagers with disposable incomes, and the plan was to make a horror movie, get it shown, and hopefully make more movies.”

There were times when the crew would shoot for several days straight without rest, and one time when Raimi stuck his hand in an electrical box, he got zapped by 20 amps of electricity. Raimi got blasted back about five feet, then he got up again, and went back to shooting the film. “Never doubt Sam Raimi,” Becker says.

Critical acclaim and an awe-inspiring production separated Halloween from the number of drive-in films at the time. In The Evil Dead Companion, Raimi recalled that many of the movies he sat through at the drive-in “always had 30 minutes of slow stuff. Then they had a good scare. Then there was another 15 minutes of slow stuff. Then there was a good suspense sequence. Then there was more slow stuff. Then a good ending. So after about 20 of these, I said, ‘Why don’t we just make one that has all the good stuff and skip the slow stuff?’”

What was even more unreal was that The Evil Dead was actually coming together. “Sam had everything in his head,” says Becker. “There was barely a script, no shot list, and only a couple of storyboards he did under duress. I’m still amazed it all cut together. I thought it was going to have the worst continuity of any move ever made. Every day we’d start having no idea where we’d left off, it was all pure guesswork, but the film was so compelling it didn’t matter. If people are scared shitless, they’re not going to pay attention to continuity.”

As Bruce Campbell wrote in his autobiography, “The message was loud and clear. Keep the pace fast and furious, and once the horror starts, never let up. We determined to go all-out, nonstop … a horror film with a capital H.” And watching a lot of mediocre horror flicks at the drive-in could give a budding director a much better education than watching a well-made scare flick. “The theory was you can learn a lot from bad horror films because they come up with good ideas, but they didn’t execute them effectively,” Sullivan says.

As a long-time fan of the Three Stooges, Raimi also brought a lot of humor to the Evil Dead films, as well as the comedy trio’s wild slapstick stunts in a much gorier context. There has always been much debate among horror fans about how much you should be laughing at a scary movie, and as Tapert says, “The first movie sells more DVDs (and Blu-rays) on a year-in, year-out basis than Evil Dead II. I think the people who like horror really like horror, and they found the second Evil Dead too tonally challenging because it had too much humor.”

Raimi was not initially a horror fan, but he eventually learned to appreciate the skill required to make an effective and scary movie. (William Friedkin was another director who wasn’t fond of horror, and he would ironically make one of the great classics of the genre with The Exorcist.) “Since Sam had done

Along with the shakicam, Sullivan created great, cutrate make-up FX for the first Dead film, including the actual Book of the Dead. “I was doing everything I could to enhance what was in the script,” Sullivan says. “In the script, the Book of the Dead was described as having some kind of animal skin, and a few letters from an ancient alphabet on the cover. I said, ‘This should be something that looks so evil, you don’t even want to pick it up.’” While no one can clearly remember what the make-up budget was, Sullivan recalled he spent no more than $400 on supplies for the shoot.

best benefits of making the first Evil Dead movie on a tiny budget is that Raimi and his partners own the negative.) Bruce Campbell told the L.A. Times he’d be interested in making another Evil Dead movie if the money could be raised from doctors and lawyers, just like the first time around. “I’m not interested in making a $60 million studio film with a bunch of twenty-four year olds telling me what to do,” he said. Thankfully, Ash Vs Evil Dead hasn’t had to go to the local orthodontist to get off the ground, and we hope it will indeed be a fitting capstone to the wonderfully bargain basement tour de force that Raimi unleashed onto the world back in the eighties.

Once it all came together, The Evil Dead premiered in Detroit, MI on October 15, 1981. Irwin Shapiro, a legendary producer who helped The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Battleship Potemkin find distribution in the States, got a kick out of Raimi’s scrappy little horror film, telling the director, “It ain’t Gone With the Wind, but I think we can make some money with it.” Then Raimi took the film to Cannes, where Stephen King was promoting Creepshow. King was floored when he saw The Evil Dead, and as aforementioned, he dubbed it, “The most ferociously original horror film of the year … a thunderstorm in a bottle, just relentless.” “That was our version of Pauline Kael,” says Tapert. “It validated all of the work we had done on that project.” With King’s seal of approval, The Evil Dead was then sold territory by territory all over the world. The Evil Dead finally opened in L.A. and New York in April 1983, and it was a nice change of pace from the usual mad slasher fare of the time. Reviewers could clearly see that Raimi was destined for much bigger things, with the L.A. Times writing, “The Evil Dead is wholly a product of the vivid imagination of Sam Raimi, for whom this film is clearly just the beginning.” Reviewers also appreciated the low budget charm of the film, with the L.A. Herald Examiner calling it “a shoe-string tour de force.” It would take Hollywood many years to realize that the low budget innovations of The Evil Dead could translate very nicely to, say, a Spider-Man movie, and it was a hell of a training ground for everyone involved. “As Bruce Campbell and I have discussed on many occasions, there’s nothing like having your most difficult shoot first,” Becker says. “Every movie since then has been easier. As tough as any of the movies I’ve made have been, nothing was as tough as Evil Dead.” And indeed, The Evil Dead was a rough shoot, but it was incredibly liberating as well. “Looking back on Evil Dead, we made exactly what we wanted to make,” says Tapert. “It’s very hard to work within the normal system to make something really unique and original. Money comes with other people’s opinions, so that’s the trade-off, even to this day.” (One of the

iv.

HIGH SCHOOL FOREVER

Heathers

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Michael Lehmann Denise Di Novi Daniel Water s March 31, 1989 103 minutes $3 million $1.1 million

Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, 2010, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Pulp Fiction, Boondock Saints, The Machinist, Kill Bill, Fight Club, 300, Eyes Wide Shut, Moon, and now Sucker Punch.

thing pigeon-holes you as either a corporate sellout or a fringe indie eccentric. If you are Daniel Craig, you can get away with filming Bond film after Bond film, only if you also regularly work on projects like Layer Cake and Flashbacks of a Fool. If you are Johnny Depp, you can’t build a career on The Libertine, From Hell, and Chocolat without also signing up for Alice in Wonderland and Pirates of the Caribbean.

What do these movies have in common? I’ll tell you: People either love them or hate them. Though some of them achieved mainstream status (in some cases years after their initial run at the box office), many failed to find as broad an audience when they first released. This, compared to sure-fire blockbuster movies like Transformers, Spiderman 2, Shrek 3, Terminator 4, or Fast 5 (the fifth installment of the Fast & the Furious franchise) which have come to be the new model of success for Hollywood: Franchises safely bring in the numbers, even if they often turn once original ideas into hollow shells of creeping mediocrity. The truth though, and the numbers don’t lie, is that “simple” is safe. Franchises work. Line up the remakes, sequels and mashups. They mean box office gold.

Steve Jobs could have decided to stick to his franchise: Computers and software. Instead, he gambled on iPod, iPhone and iPad, and it paid off. JJ Abrams could have stuck to television, but he didn’t. The result: Almost cult-like excitement for every new big screen project he produces. (Super 8 comes out soon.) Steven Pressfield, in deciding to follow The Legend of Bagger Vance (a book about golf)

How many Marvel and DC comic book superheroes are headlining movie studio franchises these days? Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Thor, Captain America, The X-Men and Wolverine, Jonah Hex, Ironman, Hulk, Green lantern, Daredevil, The Losers… The list keeps growing. Transformers and G.I. Joe didn’t escape the great 21st century rehash of pop culture childhood icons. Charlie’s Angels, Starsky & Hutch, The A-Team, Mission Impossible, Green Hornet, and scores of other popular “classic” TV series are being given the same red carpet treatment in Hollywood, and for obvious reasons: Familiar titles sell. Ask anyone associated with the Harry Potter universe. Or Shrek. Or Star Wars. Or Toy Story. In fact ask any movie producer today how much easier it is to get your sequel funded, versus getting a yet unproven original idea funded. The reality of most businesses is that money talks. Return on investment, for better and for worst, usually trumps creative or UX considerations when it comes to funding a project. There is an accepted success model in every industry – something many of us who try to push organizations beyond their comfort zones and break through stagnation refer to as the status-quo. That ROI should be a key factor (and often the central factor) in business funding decisions isn’t the problem. The problem is an often blind belief in “the safe bet.” The accepted model. The brainless PG13 sequel to the blockbuster or the formulaic movie adaptation of the comic book, complete with merchandising deals. This at the expense of relevance and long term survival. (Ergo: Long term profitability.) Using the movie industry as a platform, we can make the case that neither studios, directors nor actors can be successful if they focus solely on creating game-changing films or solely on contributing to endless tepid franchise vehicles. Success in the film industry (as with every other industry) comes from being able to balance both. Too much of the same

Dazed and Confused

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Richard Linklater Richard Linklater, Sean Daniel, James Jacks Richard Linklater September 24, 1993 102 minutes $6.9 million $7.9 million

Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused tanked badly when it hit theaters in 1993. Blame any number of factors: a nascent distributor (Gramercy Pictures) that had the backing of a major studio (Universal), but not the resources; an episodic structure that culminates in nothing of life-changing consequence; and ironically, a no-name cast that was actually chockablock with future movie stars like Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey (plus Renée Zellweger as an extra). It was revived as a cult favorite on video—and later, as a succession of psychedelic Universal DVD “special editions” that were special only for their power to shake down fans again and again. (Criterion eventually came to the rescue on that front.) Dazed And Confused had become a stoner classic, the centerpiece of a dorm-room rotation that would later include the likes of Friday, The Big Lebowski, Half Baked, and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle.

cameras, GPS trackers, and strictly enforced anti-smoking and carding ordinances, it’s unthinkable for teenagers to wander off the grid or buy some beer while the convenience-store clerk looks the other way. Dazed And Confused’s few shows of parental authority—the parents who suspend their vacation when a keg deliveryman shows up at their house, or the coaches who try to curb their players’ hard-partying summer—mostly prove futile, a hassle more than a restriction. For dusk ’til dawn, the town is theirs to prowl: the drive-thru, the pool hall, the Moon Tower, and, for a time, the 50-yard line of the football stadium. At one point, Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp, as the film’s “Woodward and Bernstein” wiseacres, even muse about the adult community’s odd indifference to teenage shenanigans. But when the rumbling bass of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” under the opening credits kick into a slow-motion shot of an orange GTO convertible as it rounds the high-school parking lot, that first wave of nostalgia hits hard. On the last day of school in small-town Texas in 1976, the future seniors wander casually in and out of class while middle-school boys while away the last few minutes playing paper football and talking about girls with huge knockers. Though the incoming freshman can expect some abuse— sometimes accompanied by genuine hostility, courtesy of Parker Posey as a queen-bee type and a hilariously belligerent Ben Affleck as a two-year senior—the only troubled characters in Dazed And Confused are the heads of each class: Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), the good-natured quarterback who doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a jock and told not to run with the wrong crowd, and Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), in many ways his heir apparent, an 8th-grade star pitcher whose awkward transition comes with extra pressure (and extra beatings).

It’s easy to see why getting baked to Dazed And Confused might be appealing, beyond the second-hand smoke from joints that circulate freely through bedrooms, muscle cars, recreation halls, and open-air parties—a utopia regulated about as strictly as the gas station where a boyish incoming highschool freshman can walk off with a sixer. There’s the classic-rock soundtrack, a K-Tel compilation of mid’70s hits from the likes of pre-shitty Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, ZZ Top, and Foghat, all evoking pangs of nostalgia even in those who were born well after 1976. There’s a stoner icon in Slater (Rory Cochrane), who offers up a soliloquy on George Washington’s vast fields of weed (“he knew it’d be a great cash crop for the Southern states”) and his wife Martha greeting him with a “big fat bowl” every night. And above all, Linklater imports some of the episodic looseness of his breakthrough film Slacker, allowing viewers to drift in and out of scenes casually, without any hard demands on their attention. It’s a sweet, smoky haze of a movie.

Linklater doesn’t inflate any of these conflicts to a big dramatic crisis—he isn’t making a TV movie where some kid winds up dead and there’s some sobering message for us to process in the end. He’s not even making American Graffiti, the film’s most obvious (and by and large inferior) predecessor, which ends its early-’60s reminiscence with ominous portents of the Vietnam War. Dazed And Confused is just one night in the life that ends with nothing more or less consequential than Pink and his buddies peeling off to score some Aerosmith tickets. (Side note: How less-than-wonderful to live in a time where these same kids would have dispersed to a computer and hit the “refresh” button at Ticketmaster.com over and over until some Ticketmaster-associated broker offered them upper-deck seats at five times face value. Let’s see Linklater lay down “Slow Ride” over that scene.) He punctuates some particularly vivid moments in slow motion—think Pink on the field, or another middle-schooler, Sabrina, going through the car wash—but the film never gets out of line. (Oddly, Linklater’s sour SubUrbia errs by doing precisely the opposite, though that’s mostly the doing of writer Eric Bogosian.)

Yet as funny and pleasurable as it is, Dazed And Confused isn’t like Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, or any of the straight-up pot comedies with premium re-watch value. Amid all those good vibes, there’s a melancholy tone that’s been curiously denied as the film’s cult following has amassed. Though no artist can dictate or control how their work will be received, Linklater’s film is about painful rites of passage: the ritual hazing of freshmen; the quarterback who moves effortlessly between cliques, wrestling with a decision that will turn his teammates against him; the nerd who starts a fight and loses, badly, rather than resign himself to being “an ineffectual nothing.” In every case, these are kids who feel penned in by tradition and expectation, whether they’re warily submitting to the business end of a shop-crafted paddle or forced to sign a bullshit clean-livin’ commitment statement in order to lead that championship season. Then again, one of the vicarious joys of watching Dazed And Confused is seeing how much freedom its characters have to roam. In our age of surveillance

As Linklater says in the quote above, shooting Dazed And Confused from a distance of 17 years made it “come out more positive than negative,” but he finds a bittersweet note between those two poles. At key points in the film, characters voice their frustration with the times: Pink says, “If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” and at the Moon Tower, another kid (Marissa Ribisi, Giovanni’s twin sister) offers the “every other decade” theory, claiming, “The ’50s were boring, the ’60s rocked, the ’70s obviously suck… Maybe the ’80s will be radical.” One line is bitter, the other ironic, but Linklater, through the benefit of perspective, suggests the possibility that all teenagers in every era think they have it bad, but they may well look back with fondness over the good times they had and took for granted. Nostalgia can be a tricky enterprise: It frames the past in a golden hue, deceptive in the way it minimizes the pain, and precious in the way it allows great memories to bubble to the surface. It’s possible that Pink, 20 or 30 years later, will start referring to these as the best years of his life, and not be remotely inclined to kill himself. Many of Linklater’s best films—Slacker, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Waking Life—have the quality of a reverie, powered more by the flow of ideas and little moments out of time than any devotion to plot points. The many indelible touches in Dazed And Confused are owed to the vividness of Linklater’s memories or some minor detail in the performances: The listing of Gilligan’s Island episodes on a blackboard, which feels like the birth of a particular strain of cultural discussion; the emphatic curl of McConaughey’s right arm when he completes the sentence, “That’s what I love about these high-school girls…”; the brief glimmers of confidence that cross Wiggins’ face on the few occasions when he isn’t totally exasperated; the beautiful overhead shot of the Moon Tower (cue Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”) when the keg is cashed and the night is over. This is the summer of ’76 the way Linklater remembers it. How others have received it, more on the sweet side of bittersweet, is out of his control.

Mean Girls

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Mark Water s Lor ne Michaels Tina Fey Apr il 30, 2003 97 minutes $17 million $129 million

Today is the tenth anniversary of Mean Girls. The film, directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey, opened on April 30th, 2004 and earned a surprising $24.4 million over its debut weekend. The Paramount Pictures release had garnered solid reviews and eventually went on to earn a terrific $129m worldwide off a $17m budget. The picture of course lived on via DVD and endless television loops. Ten years later, Mean Girls still ranks as one of the very best films ever made about high school girls. More importantly, it is worthwhile in both the story it chose to tell and who got a career bump. It was a female-centric comedy, with copious well-written female characters, where romance wasn’t the central issue and where the main female characters were not man-hungry lunatics. And it was the women associated with the picture who got career boosts. Ten years ago, Mean Girls was a great movie. But that it now counts as an important movie is arguably not entirely worthy of celebration.

In simplistic terms, one indulges in a guy’s desire to be the hero without changing too much about himself, while the other indulges a woman’s desire to not be the responsible party and throw caution to the wind. Men, who are expected in society to be selfish, are given a selfless arc while women, expected to be the caregivers and the selfless ones in society, are given films that celebrate a little selfishness. One is about selfish people stepping up for the greater good of others while the other involves selfless people being allowed to be selfish for awhile. Thus romantic comedies often seeming celebrate the selfish female lead while male fantasies celebrate a selfish boy becoming a slightly less selfish man through a hero’s journey. If you’re now screaming at the screen that “Wait, girls want to be the hero too!” and/or “Not all men are selfish pigs!”, I agree with you. And that, I’d argue is part of what makes Mean Girls resonate beyond merely the hearty laughs and sharp character work. It acknowledges both of those primal truths.

I would never ever call any actor failing to get consistent high-quality work a good thing, but it is notable that it was the girls, rather than the boys, who got career boosts. It helped launch the careers of Amanda Seyfried and Rachel McAdams, while giving ever-more credibility to a pre-30 Rock Tina Fey. It launched Lindsey Lohan into (perhaps premature) stardom. Even Lizzy Caplan eventually became a cult favorite in the indie crowd. But the men associated with Mean Girls didn’t get any real bump from the picture. There aren’t a ton of men in the film in the first place, which is something else worth noting. Conversely, Jonathan Bennett (as Lohan’s crush and eventual squeeze) and Daniel Franzese (as Lizzy Caplan’s gay best buddy) didn’t exactly shoot to the upper ranks of Hollywood, while Rajiv Surendra basically never acted again. Tim Meadows, already a longtime Saturday Night Live veteran, works relatively steadily but was (make of this what you will) still willing to reprise his role as the principal in the directto-DVD (and terrible) Mean Girls 2 in 2011.

It’s the rarest of rare things, a female-centric film that operates as a traditional male-escapist film yet tells its hero’s journey without resorting to giving the female lead a weapon and screaming “Empowerment!”. Lohan’s lead grows up just a little, sacrifices just a little, and becomes a better person while also snagging the token hot guy at the end. It’s a female centric film that operates on the rules of male escapist fantasy. It is an empowering film not because the female lead kills people, is in an arbitrary position of authority or even stands up to men in authority, but because it is a female comedy about women and about issues arguably specific to young women as they grow up in the educational system. It is the very definition of nutritious and delicious. It would be a great film if it were merely hilarious. It would be a worthwhile film purely for its thematic elements. But that it has both is what makes it a genuinely important motion picture. What’s also notable about the ten-year anniversary of Mean Girls is what’s dispiriting about the ten-year anniversary of Mean Girls. One of the reasons we’re still talking about it is because there were so few other films like in over the last ten years. The success of Mean Girls didn’t see a stampede of female-centric comedies. In fact, give or take an occasional Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mean Girls arrived right on the tipping point of when female-centric mainstream cinema truly started to become a niche. As the DVD market slowed down and studios began chasing the four-quadrant global blockbuster, which usually male full of dudes with one or two hot girls to put on the poster, the kind of female-centric film that might make $150 million worldwide became an afterthought in the industry priority list.

The break-out stars of Mean Girls were the girls themselves, which is rarer than you’d think. What makes Mean Girls interesting from a narrative pointof-view is that it’s a female-centric picture that tells what would usually be a male escapist fantasy. If you’re wondering why film critics often seem to judge female-centric films on a harsher scale than male ones, it’s partially (aside from the whole “we judge female characters in a different morality scale because girls have cooties” bit) because of the difference in what qualifies as a female escapist fantasy versus a male escapist fantasy. To put it (very) simply, one variation of the male escapist fantasy usually involves selfish men who learn to be a little less selfish and get respect and a hot girl as their prize (Die Hard, Transformers, Iron Man, etc.). The female escapist fantasy is more along the lines of female characters indulging in their own selfish desires without being judged or punished. Think Twilight, Sex and the City, Labor Day, or the million romantic comedies that are about a woman’s relentless pursuit of guys.

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, we saw mainstream female-centric comedies like Bring It On, Legally Blonde, and Dick and didn’t give it much mind. Even the 1980’s had films like Dirty Dancing and Working Girl as a matter of course, or gender-neutral adventures like Space Camp (three

guys, three gals). Today a film like Mean Girls would be seen as a genuine aberration and some kind of cultural milestone by virtue of its very existence, which is beyond sad. That Mean Girls is as good as it is should be celebrated. That Mean Girls became something of a remnant of a bygone era should be mourned. Ten years later, Mean Girls remains one of the great mainstream comedies of the last decade. It inspired a legion of catchphrases and gave a boost to nearly every single female in the cast (Lacey Chabert was the unlucky one). It was not just a great film and a genuinely laugh-out-loud comedy, but it is a shining example of the fact that female-centric films that don’t revolve around men or even stereo typically male-centric war/action scenarios can make money and can have an impact on the cultural zeitgeist. It is everything we claim we want in our female-centric pop entertainment, in terms of quality, in terms of gender representation, and in terms of how it tells its story. It is not a story about a “strong-willed and independent female” in a male-dominated landscape. It is a story about a bunch of distinct, three-dimensional, and explicitly fallible female characters going through their own respective journeys with boys on the side if present at all. I adore Mean Girls and consider it a genuine “modern classic.” My generation grew up with the blazing feminist and progressive Dirty Dancing. The last generation grew up with Mean Girls. I sincerely hope the young women of today get a “new classic” of their own to grow up with. Or, even better, more than just one. Ten years ago, Mean Girls proved female-centric comedies could be critically-acclaimed, make real money, and make stars out of its female leads. Today, I still challenge Hollywood to do better.

MAKES YOU THINK

A Clockwork Orange

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget Box office

Stanley Kubr ick Stanley Kubr ick Stanley Kubr ick A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess December 19, 1971 136 minutes $2.2 million $26.6 million

What precisely might be the effects of watching A Clockwork Orange has preoccupied several decades of film scholars. Does the film romanticize and then excuse violence? Could it create a questioning of authorities? Is its effect more devastating, as Susan Rice suggests in the epigraph: the unsettling of a pure pleasure in watching Gene Kelly dance? And why did A Clockwork Orange become such a favorite among the cult audiences of the 1970s and later? This essay will not answer any of these questions. What it will attempt is to place the U.S. public critical reception of A Clockwork Orange in parts of its cultural context with the hopes that understanding some of the dynamics and tensions existing within the moment of the film’s release will provide a description of some associations available to a film viewer of the era. These contextual associations would have a bearing on eventually answering questions about effect. The critical reception of A Clockwork Orange has been studied with rather more detail than that of most other films. This is undoubtedly because of the public debates it generated within weeks of its U.S. release with an “X” rating and its actual censoring in Britain. A particularly good synopsis of the U.S. reaction occurs in Ernest Parmentier’s summary of the criticism of A Clockwork Orange. Parmentier describes the initial laudatory praise of director Stanley Kubrick and the film, followed by denunciations of both by Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann, Pauline Kael Gary Arnold (of the Washington Post), and Roger Ebert. A series of letters in the New York Times also debated merits and deficits of A Clockwork Orange. I will return to these public arguments below.

the end of that period, local activities of censoring had intensified. In February 1973, the borough of Hastings banned A Clockwork Orange on grounds that “it was ‘violence for its own sake’ and had ‘no moral.”’ Other local authorities followed the Hastings decision despite controversy in the public discussions. That A Clockwork Orange presented “violence for its own sake” and that it “had no moral” were also major themes in the U.S. controversy, and in that order. The first negative remarks were about the representations of violence. Sarris’ review in the Village Voice in December 1971 described A Clockwork Orange as a “painless, bloodless and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy.” Kauffmann, Kael, and Richard Schickel also attacked the film for its representations of violence, warning that watching so much brutality could desensitize viewers to violence. Thus, ad hoc theories of effects of representation became one line of argumentation, and A Clockwork Orange became a strand of the discussion that had operated for centuries about obscenity and audience effect. The debates in the New York Times were couched in philosophical and political discourses. What was the moral of this film? Was it moral? What were the politics of those praising or condemning the film? What were the responsibilities of a filmmaker? Kubrick and actor Malcolm McDowell participated in these discussions, claiming that “liberals” did not like the film because it was forcing them to face reality.6 Kubrick was particularly reacting to Fred M. Hechinger, who had charged that an “alert liberal. ..should recognize the voice of fascism” in the film. By the end of the first year of its release, a third line of attack opened on A Clockwork Orange. The film was accused of misogyny. Beverly Walker, writing in an early feminist film journal, charged the film adaptation with “an attitude that is ugly, lewd and brutal toward the female human being: all of the women are portrayed as caricatures; the violence committed upon them is treated comically; the most startling aspects of the decor relate to the female form.” 8

In Britain, where methods of self-regulation and state regulation differed from those in the U.S., government review of films occurred, with some films being considered by the regulators as unsuitable viewing fare and then prohibited from public screening. Guy Phelps explains that a conservative turn in the voting of 1970 encouraged a retightening of recent more liberal decisions. Thus, when A Clockwork Orange appeared, amid several other taboo-testing films such as Ken Russell’s The Devils and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, the censoring board had a peculiar problem. Since the film itself criticized government attempts to control or condition youth behavior with the proposition that interference by authorities was more immoral than Alex’s original behavior, it might look too self-serving of the board to question the film. More important however, demands by conservative commentators, requesting that the board act against the increasing number and brutality of representations of violence on the screen, pushed the board in the opposite direction toward acting against the film in some way. Because the controversy seemed potentially damaging in the long run, Kubrick convinced his British distributors to select a narrow release: the film was shown for over a year in only one West End London theater (although to large audiences). When the distributors attempted a wider release at

Within the context of the U.S. cultural scene of 197172, that these three discursive themes–effects of the representation of violence, morality and politics, and gender relations–would come forth to be debated is easy to explain.9 That they would be the staging grounds for a cult viewer’s attraction to the film is also apparent. Precisely how these themes organized themselves in the debates is important to examine, however, for they take on a flavor peculiar to the circumstances of the era. Each of the three discourses was crossed by discourses related to (1) changing definitions of obscenity and pornography as a consequence of the sexual politics of the 1960s, (2) theories of audience effect, and (3) intertextual comparisons-interpreting the ideology of a film in relation to its source material. 10 In other words, the cultural productions of A Clockwork Orange were contextually derived but contradictory, and the lack of an open-and-shut case

about the meaning or effect or value of the film has been part of the explanation for the film’s availability to so many people in so many ways.

It was not until the mid-1800s that “pornography” appeared, and at first it meant “a description of prostitutes or of prostitution,” but also a “description of the life, manners, etc. of prostitutes and their patrons: hence, the expression or suggestion of obscene or unchaste subjects in literature or art.” Obviously, chaste versus lascivious representations of prostitutes could occur, and distinguishing between the two became important.

Effects of the Representation of Violence: Testing Definitions of Obscenity At the time of the release of A Clockwork Orange in December 1971, a wave of films with scenes of violence was splashing across U.S. screens. In a preview article for the film, Time magazine had pointed to Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Dirty Harry, and the recent Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, as part of a trend in which A Clockwork Orange was also participating.11 Although some arguments could be made that these films were fictional responses to the nightly news images of Vietnam, two other, very salient, causal factors for the increasingly violent material were the previous twenty-year history of U.S. film exhibition and the changing laws of obscenity and pornography. Since the end of World War II, foreign films had been appearing with regularity on screens in larger U.S. cities; they were winning best film awards from U.S. and foreign critics and film festivals. Often, foreign films presented more sexually explicit images or dealt with seamier aspects of modem life, creating a stronger sense of verisimilitude. Finally, breaching the boundaries of subject matter that had been considered off-limits by the Hollywood film industry was thus a competitive move by U.S. filmmakers against the foreign cinema. It was also a move of product differentiation against U.S. television, which had taken up the role of the family entertainer. During the twenty years up to 1971, Hollywood films had steadily penetrated earlier limits on sexual and violent materials. It had finally given up on the old production code’s binary system of okay/not-okay, and in 1968 moved to a rating system organized by ages. The G-GP-R-X system opened up possibilities of competition through subject matter in ways hitherto undreamed of. Such a system, however, required that previous definitions of obscenity and liability be changed before Hollywood could believe itself safe from criminal prosecution.

Now I would note here that although Kendrick suggests that obscenity was traditionally located within the realm of comedy (and outside the field of serious literature), obviously images of eroticism have not always been deployed for a comedic effect; we would be naive to think that the nineteenth century invented representations designed for sexual arousal. What seems to be happening, I think, is that the term “obscenity” is being focused toward the sexual (and scatological), and its semantic field is being redistributed to include not only sexuality explicit materials for comedic effects but also erotic ones which do not fit into traditional norms of serious literature. The project of categorization is being confronted by ambiguous materials. Moreover, soon theorists of law began to try to make distinctions between intent and effect when asked to rule on the categorization of instances of reputed obscenity or pornography. Here theories of audience effect entered. The distinctions made are, in legal discourse, “tests,” and legal tests began to be made on the basis of presumptions that images could have audience effects. Kendrick notes that Lord Chief Justice Cockburn concluded an important mid-1800s British decision, Regina v. Hicklin, on obscenity on the basis of a test whether there existed in the materials “the tendency to corrupt the minds and morals of those into whose hands it might come.” If the conclusion of the “Hicklin Test” was positive, then one could infer that the author’s intentions had been obscene, and the author would be judged guilty. Now two observations are apparent: one is that the materials are being assumed to be naturally readable as obscene or not; the second is that intent is being determined from presumed effect. The various gaps in reasoning in these two propositions are immense.

The representation of sexually explicit materials is not to be equated with the representation of violently explicit materials, nor is either to be assumed obscene. However, the confusion of these notions was part of public protests of the 1960s. Those protests had to do with what counted as obscenity, and laws and discourses were in transition on this matter. In his excellent study of the history of pornography, Walter Kendrick traces the distinctions, and then confusions, between the terms “obscenity” and “pornography.” Kendrick argues that until the 1800s, Western tradition generally separated literature into serious literature and comedy. Serious literature had decorum, high status, and a public availability; comedy was abusive, low, and, if obscene, segregated into a nonpublic space. Obscenity could occur through use of both sexual and scatological materials.

Although both British and U.S. law generally operated under the Hicklin Test during the 1800s, by the later years of the century U.S. courts were increasingly sympathetic to claims that if the questionable item were “art,” then it was excluded from judgments of obscenity. In other words, U.S. law began to rewrite the traditional binary categories of serious literature and comedy, with the opposition becoming serious literature/art versus non-serious (i.e. cheap) literature/not-art, and obscenity was possible only in the instance of the latter. In 1913, Judge Learned Hand undermined the “transparent-reading-of-effect-proves-intent” assumptions of the Hicklin Test by separating audiences: a possible effect on underage

individuals should not necessitate the general prohibition of an item. It could be available privately, if not publicly, to mature readers. The effects of the troublesome representation were not universal or necessarily degenerate. In some sense, Judge Hand created a “Selected-Effect Test.”

other subject matter which had also been increasingly portrayed recently in public sites. Alongside the debates on what constituted obscene materials grew the arguments that representations of dominance by one person over another (rapes, objectification of individuals, and so forth) fit the category of “patently offensive” and had a potential to produce harmful effects (a continuation of the Hicklin Test) Thus, antipornography feminists objected not to sexual content but to content they claimed represented violence, and they argued for its categorization as obscenity and for its removal from the public sphere.

Beyond the separations of art versus not-art and universal versus select (and, hence, public versus private), U.S. law added a third binary: the Part-Versus-Whole Test. The courts decided a 1922 case by the argument that although parts of a book might be lewd, the “whole” book was not; the “whole” book was art. If the whole book were art, then the power of art would override the effects of the segments of obscenity. Again, audience effects were significant in the test, but refinements were being made in how those effects were to be determined.

In the midst of the late 1960s debates over redefining obscenity to include not only hard-core pornography but also violence appeared A Clockwork Orange. While ultimately legally protected as a work of art, A Clockwork Orange was not protected in the sphere of public discourse. Thus, the discussion about the representations of violence in the film echoes the centuries-long debates over sexual obscenity.19 Moreover, the film’s violence was not isolated as in the case of other violent films being released at about the same time: A Clockwork Orange had sexual content completely intertwined within its violence.

These U.S. trends in regulating sexual materials explains why the United States ruled Ulysses (and The Well of Loneliness) could be published long before Britain did. It is also the fact that, as a consequence of these tests, U.S. courts delegated pornography to the category of not art. In 1957 the Roth Test became the new statement of the evolving semantics and theory of effect: “to the average person using community standards,” would the dominant theme of the item appeal to prurient interests? In this test, the work is judged as a whole, and the United States as a whole is the community doing the judging. Moreover, obscenity is reduced to sexual content, although not all sexual content is obscene (it is not obscene if it is in art). Obscenity is not protected by free speech, but obscenity is now “material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interests.” While the Roth Test opened up some types of material-the U.S. Supreme Court cleared physique magazines (which were often used as erotic material by gay men) of obscenity charges in the early 1960s — the test also tacitly reduced obscenity to sexual content (although likely scatological material would also be considered). The 1973 refinement of the Roth Test by the Miller Test included not only the Whole-Item Test, but added the query of whether sexual conduct was represented in a “patently offensive” way.

One of the major themes of the attackers of the representations of violence in A Clockwork Orange was that it was not art but exploitation. It failed Judge Hand’s Whole-Item Test. “Exploitation” was a film-specific term for cheap, prurient, patently offensive, and–a sure sign it was not art commercially driven. Examples of these criticisms included remarks such as those in Films in Review that the film “sinks to the depths of buck-chasing (sex scribblings on walls; total nudity; sightgags for perverts).”20 Schickel agreed, defining the film as “commercial cynicism,” and David Denby called it a “grotesque extension of the youth movie” (also not art in 1971). Kael pointed out that in one scene the film opens on the rival gang’s attempt to gang-rape a young girl, so that, she underlined, more of the stripping can be shown: “it’s the purest exploitation.”2l In these arguments over what category the film belonged to-art or not-art-operate not only discourses concerned with the changing definitions of obscenity and theories of audience effect, but also discourses of intertextual comparison. In the criticisms of its representations of violence (and in the ones on the film’s morality and its gender politics), a major strategy of both attackers and defenders was to compare and contrast the source material with the film. Here the source material is Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. With the development of auteurist criticism in the 1960s, the film A Clockwork Orange also became Stanley Kubrick’s film. Thus, attributions of authorship and intent in these comparisons reduce to how Kubrick changed (or did not change) Burgess’s work. In the claim that the film’s representations of violence classified it as exploitation, not art, attackers used the intertextual-comparison strategy. For example, Kauffmann noted that Kubrick changed

Joining this stream of shifting semantics about obscenity were the cultural, political, and sexual debates of the 1960s: the anti-Vietnam War crisis pitted free-love flower children against gun-toting war militants. “Make love not war” introduced a binary contrast that paralleled the question, why was it that sexuality was deemed by authority figures offensive enough to be prohibited from view but violence was not? Weren’t violence and its representations equally or probably more obscene? If sexual content might have harmful effects by appealing to susceptible minds, so might violent images. Thus, at a time of increasing leniency toward (or increasing means to justify) the representation of sexuality, political differences turned attention toward

the woman whom Alex assaults with one of her favorite art objects from “an old woman to a sexy broad [sic] and [killed] her with a giant ceramic phallus (thus changing sheer heartlessness into sex sensation).” With the tacit proposition that the original novel is art, evidence of Kubrick’s sexualization of the content proves that Kubrick’s film is exploitation and not-art.

Thus, in the debates about the representations of violence in A Clockwork Orange, both sides of the discussion assumed several points: a) defining the film as art or not art was important, and b) determining the effects of the representations of violence had pertinence. Like the legal establishment of the era, these tests would determine how to categorize the film, and evaluation would follow.

Those criticizing the film for its representations of violence not only tried to define it as not-art, but also argued that the representations had harmful effects and passed the Hicklin Test. Kael probably was relying on contemporary social science theses that individual experiences with violent images were not specifically harmful but repeated exposure to such images would eventually be bad when she rejected the idea that violent images were only reflecting reality; instead, she claimed they were “desensitizing US.” Vincent Canby somewhat responded to Kael by writing that although he was not disturbed by the violence, he could believe that this might not be the case for “immature audiences” (the Selected-Effect Test).

Morality and Politics: Reading the Ideology of a Film Although for years U.S. Marxist critics had overtly been reading the ideology of texts, and liberal reviewers had tacitly engaged in the same practice, numerous events of the 1960s increased tendencies to include these questions of content in evaluations of movie fare. These 1960s events included all those factors involved with the issues of representing sexuality and violence discussed above, but they also incorporated the implications of auteurist criticism and the move of film criticism into universities and colleges.

Some people, of course, disagreed with those criticizing the film on the basis of its representations of violence. In these cases, the writers were attempting to establish that A Clockwork Orange was within the category of art and, consequently, not degenerate or obscene in its depictions of violence. If it was art, then the overall effect of the film was an art effect, which de facto would not harm its viewers.

Within Western traditions of criticism, a debate has been waged between advocates who believe that human agency accounts for causality and those who stress the importance of social structures. This is often described as the humanist-structuralist debate. For most conservative and liberal commentators, the more prominent cause of events is human decision making; hence, Western literary tradition has so often stressed determining who created a work of art. This concern was important in film criticism almost immediately at the start of the movies, but it certainly increased during the 1960s with the advent of auteurist criticism. Causes for auteurism include the influences of foreign art cinema and foreign film criticism. Defining films as art also permitted the wide introduction of film courses into colleges and universities. Moreover, studying contemporary culture as art (or at least as a reflection of culture) had relevance at a time when young radicals decried the staleness of the status quo institutions, which were often blamed for the public’s lackadaisical attitude toward racism and the ever-deepening U.S. commitment in Vietnam.28

The ways to defend the film as art were similar to the ways to attack it. Kubrick himself defended the film via the intertextual comparison strategy; he claimed, “It’s all in the plot.” Others argued that the violence was justified realistically. Hollis Alpert pointed to the film’s realistic connections, among them “the growth in youthful violence, the drug cultures, and the extraordinary increase in eroticism.” Others took what Paul D. Zimmerman aptly described as a “mythic realism” approach: the characters are caricatures, but of “some more basic essence.” A third strategy to make the film art, beyond the intertextual-comparison approach and the realism argument, was the aesthetically motivated thesis. If a critic examined the images of violence in the film and the critic could discern formal and stylistic patterns, then they were a sure sign the film was “art” and not exploitation. Canby wrote, “the movie shows a lot of aimless violence–the exercise of aimless choice–but it is as formally structured as the music of Alex’s ‘lovely lovely Ludwig Van,’ which inspires in Alex sado-masochistic dreams of hangings, volcanic eruptions and other disasters.” Cocks in Time claimed the violence was “totally stylized, dreamlike, absurd.” Alpert believed, “in lesser hands, this kind of thing could be disgusting or hateful, but curiously, as Kubrick handles it, it isn’t. For one thing, the stylization throughout is constant.” Mythic realism becomes universality: “Imagery, the kind that mythologizes and endures, is the nucleus of the film experience,” claimed Playboy.

Trying to determine the authorship of a film, however, had consequences. Once agency can be pinpointed, so can blame. And, thus, locating in Kubrick (or Burgess) responsibility for representations raised philosophical and political issues of morality. Just what was the ideology the author(s) had presented? What were the implications of that ideology? Both attackers and defenders of the film spent some space on the project of defining its meaning. Burgess himself thought the novel was about “the power of choice.” Kael said the film’s point was that “the punk was a free human being,” while Schickel summarized the thesis as the “loss of the capacity to do evil is a minor tragedy, for it implies a loss also of the creative capacity to do good.” Rice described it as “free choice must prevail/man’s nature is perverse.”29

No matter what the movie’s thesis, one major strategy to absolve or blame Kubrick for any potentially morally corrupt subject matter was the intertextual-comparison tactic. Critics who wanted to rescue the film argued that the novel was morally worse or that what Kubrick put in the film was already subtextually in the novel.30 Critics who disliked

corrupt, then this was authoritarian ideology. Jackson Burgess furthered that line, arguing: “the laughter of Clockwork Orange is a mean and cynical snigger at the weakness of our own stomachs… A strong stomach is the first requirement of a storm trooper.”34 Not only was the protagonist too nice in contrast with the victims and the theme amoral or even fascist, but Kubrick’s authorial voice was too distant and detached, making him doubly complicit with the theme. Kubrick was described as something of an amoral “god-figure” or as a misanthrope. Kauffmann wrote, “But the worst flaw in the film is its air of cool intelligence and ruthless moral inquiry because those elements are least fulfilled.” Kael believed that the authorial voice was” a leering, portentous style,” while Clayton Riley accused Kubrick of “offer[ing] no cogent or meaningful commentary on [the violence].” Kubrick’s authorship could have been redeemed, Denby thought, had values been articulated by the end of the film, but “the mask of the ironist and savage parodist has fallen off, and behind it is revealed the fact of a thoroughgoing misanthrope.” “How bored and destructive Kubrick seemed,” concluded Seth Feldman.35

the film, of course, found the differences from the novel proof of Kubrick’s agency and his ideology. So both camps accepted Kubrick as author, used intertextual comparison to determine Kubrick’s authorship, and then evaluated what they believed they had discovered. One primary site on which this debate over ideology and morality focused was the film’s representation of Alex. Both in the abstract and via comparison to the novel, reviewers thought Kubrick had created a central protagonist with whom the audience was to side. Alex “has more energy and style and dash-more humanity-than anyone else in the movie”; Alex might be compared with mass killer Charles Manson, yet Alex is “surprisingly but undeniably engaging”; Alex is “more alive than anyone else in the movie, and younger and more attractive.”31 Those who appreciated this protagonist used Alex’s representation to justify their respect for the film and to argue a positive moral message; those who did not appreciate this protagonist could also accuse Kubrick of using audience sympathy to make individuals morally complicit with an amoral message.

The conclusions about authorial viewpoint were largely derived from two aspects of the film. One was the adaptational differences between the novel and the film, charged to Kubrick’s decision making; the other was technical style. Part and parcel of auteurist criticism was a careful reading of stylistic choices, for, it was often claimed, the authorial voice of a director might be traced through style even if the director was compelled by studio or production circumstances to present a specific plotline. Here auteurist criticism provoked reviewers to attribute nonnormative choices in mise-en-scene, camerawork, editing, and sound to Kubrick’s agency and to read them as meaningful expressions of his position vis-a-vis to the plotline he was, so to speak, given. Examples of such defenses have been provided above in relation to justifying the representations of violence as aesthetically motivated, including the classic auteurist praise of “consistency” of aesthetic design. The distance such an aesthetic choice produced could also be read as a protective device for the audience: the coolness provided for the audience a “resilience” needed to view the “multiple horrors.”36

Indeed, the claims that the film was corrupt, unfair, and amoral were as many as the criticisms of its representations of violence and sexual attack. Kael was one of the first critics to pursue this line of denunciation. “The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference.” The movie makes it too easy to enjoy and even identify with Alex. He is given too many rationales for his behavior (bad parents, bad friends, bad social workers); he is cleaned up compared with the book’s Alex; the victims are “cartoon nasties with upper-class accents a mile wide.”32 Indeed, many of the criticisms in this range of discourse centered on not only whether Alex was made “too nice” but whether Alex’s victims were set up to be destroyed. Schickel’s view was that “We are never for a moment allowed even a fleeting suggestion of sympathy for anyone else, never permitted to glimpse any other character of personal magnetism, wit, or sexual attractiveness comparable to Alex’s. As a result, the film, though surprisingly faithful to the plot line of the novel, is entirely faithless to its meaning.”33

Critics of the film, however, connected Kubrick’s stylistic choices with exploitation cinema (not art). Jackson Burgess pointed out that “the stylization shifts your attention, in a sense, away from the simple physical reality of a rape or a murder and focuses it upon the quality of feeling: cold, mindless, brutality.” Kauffmann wrote that the camerawork was “banal and reminiscent” of many other recent films. Kael concluded, “Is there anything sadder-and ultimately more repellent-than a clean-minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they’re frigidly, pedantically calculated.”37 Kubrick’s misanthropy, moreover, was also

It was in this group of responses that the accusation was made that “ the film was fascist. Hechinger’s criticism derived from the series of propositions that if the theme was saying that humanity is inevitably

a misogyny.

a child (age ten), rather than stripped naked and well endowed. Walker asked, “Why is it the women change radically in this Orwellian world, but not the men?” (p. 9). The sexual design of the film’s mise-en-scene does seem to have excited most of the reviewers (or their layout supervisors). The Korova milk bar and Alex’s close-up headshot were the favorite publicity stills to reproduce in articles, about the film. Another favorite image was the scene of Alex’s rectal examination by the prison guard, featured on the cover of Films and Filming for the issue that reviewed the film.39 That Films and Filming took such delight in the film seems to confirm Walker’s claim of a “homosexual motif ” running through the film, since Films and Filming had a covert (or not so covert!) address to gay men. Its review and selection of accompanying photos provide ample evidence of another potential reading of the text, a point to which I will return below.

Gender Relations: Revealing Sexual Politics The sexual revolution of the 1960s and the concurrent social and political upheaval had coalesced by the late 1960s. On the national scene feminists were criticizing canonical serious literature from perspectives of gender discrimination: Kate Millett’s groundbreaking Sexual Politics appeared in 1969, and by the early 1970s feminist film critics and academics were starting to read films ideologically for not only their moral or political politics but also their sexual representations. Joan Mellen’s Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film was published in 1973, Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream also in 1973, Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape in 1974, and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975. In the second volume (1972) of an early feminist journal, Beverly Walker took on A Clockwork Orange.38 Her strategy was the same as that of the traditional auteur critic: she used intertextual comparison with the novel and stylistic choices to conclude that Kubrick “has made an intellectual’s pornographic film” (p. 4). Such a claim in 1972 needs to be recognized as a very powerful statement, given the debates about pornography and obscenity described above, and the militancy of feminists of the era. It should also, like the charge of “fascism,” be understood as a rhetorical device aggressively arguing for significant social and political change. Its communicative function was not only descriptive but also attention-getting.

In conclusion, Walker suggested that the film was “woman-hating.” As mentioned above, she believed it had “an attitude that is ugly, lewd and brutal toward the female human being: all of the women are portrayed as caricatures; the violence committed upon them is treated comically; the most startling aspects of the decor relate to the female form” (p. 4). The film was, again, exploitation: “all the naked ladies Kubrick has astutely used as commercial window dressing” (p. 4). My review of the critical response to the film has focused to a large degree on the negative criticism; yet the film has become a cult favorite. Unfortunately, details of the fans’ responses to the film could not be, found. Still, speculation from the circumstances of the period and what became the focus of the critical response can give us some glimpse into what might have mattered to the early lovers of the movie.

Walker’s essay pinpointed numerous differences between the novel and the film, for the purpose, Walker argued, of making sex and genitalia more central to the film. The changes she described included ones of mise-en-scene and plot. In the film, the outfits worn by Alex’s droogs deemphasize the shoulders (as opposed to the costumes worn by the gang in the novel) and instead call attention to the male genitals, as the action shifts to include not only violence (as in the novel) but sexual violence. The Korova Bar is not described in the book; hence, the set design is Kubrick’s fantasy. The characteristics of the women are changed from the novel. The novel’s cat lady is older and lives in a house with antiques. When Kubrick introduces his cat woman, she is shown in a grotesque yoga position, has a “phony, hard voice,” and is surrounded, by phallic and sexual decor-to invite, one might claim, sexual thoughts in the observers of the art objects. Such a decor and woman provide the classic excuse that the victim asked for the rape.

Kubrick’s authorial style was viewed by both supporters and critics as an aloof criticism of the social scene. Where one might put that authorial point of view in a range of political categories was debated, but without doubt that point of view was considered iconoclastic. Such a nontraditional position appeals to most subcultural groups with which cult viewers often align themselves. Kubrick’s earlier work had already positioned him as out of the mainstream anyway: Dr. Strangelove was critical of every authority figure; 2001 immediately became a head movie. So when Kubrick’s next film came out, anti-authoritarian adolescents were ready to take up the film no matter what. The movie’s representations of violence, sexuality, and sexual violence could be rationalized as realism or mythic realism, and also enjoyed for their flouting of recent obscenity and pornography taboos. Additionally, in the late 1960s, film-viewing audiences were well versed in several nontraditional strategies for watching films. One major viewing strategy had been the mainstream, “disposable” strategy in which seeing a film once was the norm. However, the concept and, practice of repeat viewings of some

Not only is the cat woman redesigned, but Alex’s mother is visualized. Walker believed that she was not dressed as befitting her age, although Alex’s father seems traditionally clothed. The woman to be raped by the rival gang is clothed in the novel and also only

movies had already become normative for two types of audiences: art-house devotees and underground/ trash-cinema filmgoers. Both types of audiences rewatched films for several reasons: to find authorial signatures, to seek hidden messages, and to participate in a group audience experience.40 While arthouse and underground audiences often overlapped, differences in their makeup did exist and can be used to hypothesize their attraction to A Clockwork Orange. Art-house audiences had been typed as “eggheads,” and were generally an intellectual crowd. Kubrick’s work, with its complicated mise-en-scene and ambiguous message, fits well with the characteristics of an art-house film. Underground cinema had a more eclectic audience, and because of the places and times where underground cinema was shown in the 1960s (run-down, large-city theaters; midnight screenings), underground cinema’s audiences were mostly urban, male, and gay or gay’ friendly. Out of the rebel underground cinema of the 1960s, the mid-1970s cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show developed, with, at least initially, a strong gay participation. Now, I would not go so far as to suggest that more than a few audience aficionados of A Clockwork Orange read the film as camp, but that reading is, I believe, available from the sexual politics of the context and parts of evidence remaining (the Films and Filming “reading”). Moreover, the exaggeration of the mise-en-scene has echoes in 1960s classic underground films such as Flaming Creatures (1963) and Blonde Cobra (1963). It is worth noting that Andy Warhol purchased the screenplay rights to Burgess’s novel in the mid1960s and produced his own adaptation of A Clockwork Orange: Vinyl (1965). Not surprisingly, Vinyl exceeds Kubrick’s film in terms of the explicit sado-masochistic possibilities of the plot, but the general line of development is remarkably close to that of the novel, which lends more credibility to Walker’s thesis of the availability of a homosexual motif subtending the action. Whatever the causes for the cult following of A Clockwork Orange, the density of reactions has perhaps also provided more avenues for speculating about violence, sexuality, morality, and gender politics. If Kubrick unwittingly participated with the authorities in his own version of the Ludovico technique, perhaps this was not the least valuable set of issues on which to inflict scholars and critics of cinema.

Fight Club

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget Box office

David Fincher Ar t Linson, CÃ©an Chafin, Ross Grayson Bell Jim Uhls Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk September 10, 1999 139 minutes $63 million $100.9 million

In his memoir Art Linson, a producer of the film, describes the aftermath of the first screening at the 20th Century Fox lot: ashen-faced executives imagining their higher-ups (including Rupert Murdoch) “flopping around like acid-crazed carp wondering how such a thing could even have happened.” The nervousness over screen violence was at a renewed high in the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School, and this must have seemed like the worst possible time to release a film in which an army of alienated men, led by Brad Pitt’s charismatic Tyler Durden, an übermensch in a red leather jacket, engage in bare-knuckle brawls, antisocial vandalism and outright revolutionary terrorism. When “Fight Club” opened in October 1999 after much defensive maneuvering from the studio (which delayed the release and struggled to find a marketing hook), the pundits eagerly took aim. “The critical reaction was polarized,” said Edward Norton, who plays the film’s nameless narrator, “but the negative half of that was as vituperative as anything I’ve ever been a part of.” In one of the more apoplectic slams, Rex Reed, writing in The New York Observer, called it “a film without a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in hell.” More than one critic condemned the movie as an incitement to violence; several likened it to fascist propaganda. (“It resurrects the Führer principle,” one British critic declared.) On her talk show an appalled Rosie O’Donnell implored viewers not to see the movie and, for good measure, gave away its big twist.

Reports and urban legends about real-life fight clubs and copycat crimes still pop up occasionally. In the academic sphere, as an Internet search of scholarly journals reveals, “Fight Club” has inspired a host of interpretations — Nietzschean, Buddhist, Marxist — in papers that take on topics including the “rhetoric of masculinity,” the “poetics of the body” and the “economics of patriarchy.” Mr. Fincher, who crammed the collector’s edition DVD, released in 2000, with a trove of deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes supplements (all are available on the new Blu-ray version), said the movie needed time to be freed from initial preconceptions. “It was sold as, hey come see people beat each other up,” he said recently by phone from Boston, where he was shooting a film about the founding of Facebook called “The Social Network.” To his irritation Fox ran ads during wrestling matches, and many critics described it as a head-banging testosterone fest. But Mr. Fincher has observed that “women maybe get the humor faster,” he said, adding that young female audiences seemed to appreciate the film’s satirical spin on macho posturing. Reached by e-mail, Mr. Palahniuk went further and called the film “the best date flick ever.” “The ‘Fight Club’ generation is the first generation to whom sex and death seem synonymous,” he said, pointing out that the “meet-cute” between the characters played by Mr. Norton and Helena Bonham Carter occurs in a support group for the terminally ill. Having grown up with an awareness of AIDS, younger readers and viewers, he added, “could identify with the implied marriage of sex and death; and once that fear was acknowledged those people could move forward and risk finding romantic love.”

As many had hoped and predicted “Fight Club,” which had a budget of more than $60 million, bombed at the box office, earning $37 million during its North American run. But the film’s potent afterlife is proof that, as Mr. Norton put it, “you can’t always rate the value of a piece of art through the short turnaround ways that we tend to assess things.” Not only has “Fight Club” performed exceptionally well on DVD — it has sold more than six million copies on DVD and video, and is being issued in a 10th anniversary Blu-ray edition on Nov. 17 — but it has also become a kind of cultural mother lode. Besides elevating the profile of the novelist Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the original 1996 book, Mr. Fincher’s film has spawned a video game (featuring the Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst as a character) and a Donatella Versace fashion line (men’s wear adorned with razor blades). The swaggering gospel of Tyler Durden, much of it taken verbatim from Mr. Palahniuk’s book, has provided the cultural lexicon with one seemingly deathless catchphrase (“The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club”) and numerous pop-sociological sound bites (“We’re a generation of men raised by women”; “You are not your khakis”).

Mr. Fincher, Mr. Norton and Mr. Pitt, who were all in their 30s when they made the film (as was Mr. Palahniuk when he wrote the book), have each talked about being personally struck by the angry-youngman disaffection of “Fight Club.” When Mr. Fincher read the novel, he said, “I thought, Who is this Chuck Palahniuk and how has he been intercepting all my inner monologues?” The movie’s arrival in the season of pre-millennial anxiety gave it the aura of what Mr. Norton called “an end-of-the-century protest.” A highly personal work made within the studio system, it also seemed like part of a larger cinematic groundswell. “There was a feeling that our crowd was starting to express itself,” Mr. Norton said, referring to a bountiful year for young American filmmakers that also saw revelatory works like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” David O. Russell’s “Three Kings” and Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich.” In his memoir Art Linson, a producer of the film, describes the aftermath of the first screening at the 20th Century Fox lot: ashen-faced executives imagining their higher-ups (including Rupert Murdoch) “flopping around like acid-crazed carp wondering how

such a thing could even have happened.” The nervousness over screen violence was at a renewed high in the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School, and this must have seemed like the worst possible time to release a film in which an army of alienated men, led by Brad Pitt’s charismatic Tyler Durden, an übermensch in a red leather jacket, engage in bare-knuckle brawls, antisocial vandalism and outright revolutionary terrorism. When “Fight Club” opened in October 1999 after much defensive maneuvering from the studio (which delayed the release and struggled to find a marketing hook), the pundits eagerly took aim. “The critical reaction was polarized,” said Edward Norton, who plays the film’s nameless narrator, “but the negative half of that was as vituperative as anything I’ve ever been a part of.” In one of the more apoplectic slams, Rex Reed, writing in The New York Observer, called it “a film without a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in hell.” More than one critic condemned the movie as an incitement to violence; several likened it to fascist propaganda. (“It resurrects the Führer principle,” one British critic declared.) On her talk show an appalled Rosie O’Donnell implored viewers not to see the movie and, for good measure, gave away its big twist. As many had hoped and predicted “Fight Club,” which had a budget of more than $60 million, bombed at the box office, earning $37 million during its North American run. But the film’s potent afterlife is proof that, as Mr. Norton put it, “you can’t always rate the value of a piece of art through the short turnaround ways that we tend to assess things.” Not only has “Fight Club” performed exceptionally well on DVD — it has sold more than six million copies on DVD and video, and is being issued in a 10th anniversary Blu-ray edition on Nov. 17 — but it has also become a kind of cultural mother lode. Besides elevating the profile of the novelist Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the original 1996 book, Mr. Fincher’s film has spawned a video game (featuring the Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst as a character) and a Donatella Versace fashion line (men’s wear adorned with razor blades). The swaggering gospel of Tyler Durden, much of it taken verbatim from Mr. Palahniuk’s book, has provided the cultural lexicon with one seemingly deathless catchphrase (“The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club”) and numerous pop-sociological sound bites (“We’re a generation of men raised by women”; “You are not your khakis”). Reports and urban legends about real-life fight clubs and copycat crimes still pop up occasionally. In the academic sphere, as an Internet search of scholarly journals reveals, “Fight Club” has inspired a host of

interpretations — Nietzschean, Buddhist, Marxist — in papers that take on topics including the “rhetoric of masculinity,” the “poetics of the body” and the “economics of patriarchy.” Mr. Fincher, who crammed the collector’s edition DVD, released in 2000, with a trove of deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes supplements (all are available on the new Blu-ray version), said the movie needed time to be freed from initial preconceptions. “It was sold as, hey come see people beat each other up,” he said recently by phone from Boston, where he was shooting a film about the founding of Facebook called “The Social Network.” To his irritation Fox ran ads during wrestling matches, and many critics described it as a head-banging testosterone fest. But Mr. Fincher has observed that “women maybe get the humor faster,” he said, adding that young female audiences seemed to appreciate the film’s satirical spin on macho posturing. Reached by e-mail, Mr. Palahniuk went further and called the film “the best date flick ever.” “The ‘Fight Club’ generation is the first generation to whom sex and death seem synonymous,” he said, pointing out that the “meet-cute” between the characters played by Mr. Norton and Helena Bonham Carter occurs in a support group for the terminally ill. Having grown up with an awareness of AIDS, younger readers and viewers, he added, “could identify with the implied marriage of sex and death; and once that fear was acknowledged those people could move forward and risk finding romantic love.” Mr. Fincher, Mr. Norton and Mr. Pitt, who were all in their 30s when they made the film (as was Mr. Palahniuk when he wrote the book), have each talked about being personally struck by the angry-youngman disaffection of “Fight Club.” When Mr. Fincher read the novel, he said, “I thought, Who is this Chuck Palahniuk and how has he been intercepting all my inner monologues?” The movie’s arrival in the season of pre-millennial anxiety gave it the aura of what Mr. Norton called “an end-of-the-century protest.” A highly personal work made within the studio system, it also seemed like part of a larger cinematic groundswell. “There was a feeling that our crowd was starting to express itself,” Mr. Norton said, referring to a bountiful year for young American filmmakers that also saw revelatory works like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” David O. Russell’s “Three Kings” and Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich.” But as with all generational touchstones there is the matter of a cultural divide. “People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture,” Mr. Palahniuk said. Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they “really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die — beaten to a pulp, riddled with cancer, or smashed in a plane

crash.”

you’ve managed to do something true to your own sensations. But at the same time you realize that this has nothing to do with you.”

The secret to the enduring allure of “Fight Club” may be that it is, as Mr. Norton put it, quoting Mr. Fincher, “a serious film made by deeply unserious people.” In other words, a film as willing to take on profound questions as it is to laugh at and contradict itself: what is “Fight Club” if not the most fashionable commercial imaginable for anti-materialism? A movie of big ideas and abundant ambiguities, it can be read and reread in many ways. Mr. Fincher said, “Every once in a while someone will send me their thesis and ask, Is this close to the mark?” He sometimes shares the papers with Mr. Palahniuk and the actors but said it’s ultimately not for him to decide. Mr. Norton agrees. “Joseph Campbell has that great idea about mythologies, that a myth functions best when it’s transparent, when people see through the story to themselves,” he said. “When something gets to the point where it becomes the vehicle for people sorting out their own themes, I think you’ve achieved a kind of holy grail. Maybe the best you can say is that you’ve managed to do something true to your own sensations. But at the same time you realize that this has nothing to do with you.” But as with all generational touchstones there is the matter of a cultural divide. “People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture,” Mr. Palahniuk said. Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they “really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die — beaten to a pulp, riddled with cancer, or smashed in a plane crash.” The secret to the enduring allure of “Fight Club” may be that it is, as Mr. Norton put it, quoting Mr. Fincher, “a serious film made by deeply unserious people.” In other words, a film as willing to take on profound questions as it is to laugh at and contradict itself: what is “Fight Club” if not the most fashionable commercial imaginable for anti-materialism? A movie of big ideas and abundant ambiguities, it can be read and reread in many ways. Mr. Fincher said, “Every once in a while someone will send me their thesis and ask, Is this close to the mark?” He sometimes shares the papers with Mr. Palahniuk and the actors but said it’s ultimately not for him to decide. Mr. Norton agrees. “Joseph Campbell has that great idea about mythologies, that a myth functions best when it’s transparent, when people see through the story to themselves,” he said. “When something gets to the point where it becomes the vehicle for people sorting out their own themes, I think you’ve achieved a kind of holy grail. Maybe the best you can say is that

Donnie Darko

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Richard Kelly Sean McKittr ick, Nany Juvonen, Adam Fields Richard Kelly Januar y 19, 2001 133 minutes $3.8 million $7.3 million

Donnie Darko is, on its most basic level, a film that is homage to 80s culture. It’s a cult classic (like many 80s films!) that references other 80s films, uses popular 80s film themes, and is set in 1988. But that is not all Donnie Darko is about. The film also makes statements about the socio-political and cultural developments of the late 80s, the reversal of family roles, etc., as well as being a superhero film, or more properly, an anti-super-hero narrative. It’s also a film that presents the age-old debate about predestination and free will; it posits alternate dimensions and worlds. But that isn’t all, either. It also contains elements of Jungian psychoanalysis, gnosticism, and the occult.

level of Donnie Darko – the hero who must face up to his destiny, and we have been clued in to this by the opening song. We see at the dinner scene that the family is dysfunctional — the father is not a father, and will remain passive throughout the film, as the mother runs the family and the children are rebellious and profane. This relates to the film’s criticism of 80s culture, especially its backward, hypocritical suburban morality. Note at 5:53 we see the Escher drawing of the eye prominently displayed, and as many know, in the reflection of the pupil, is death. Death will be a major theme in the film, but not just the generic notion of death, but death from a particularly Jungian and gnostic perspective.

To analyze, we will begin with the film’s opening sequence. It ends with the line from “The Killing Moon” song, ‘fate, up against your will; he will wait until you give yourself to him.” The classical hero had to face up to his face and survive it with stoic resolve. That is one level of Donnie Darko — the hero who must face up to his destiny, and we have been clued in to this by the opening song.

Consider as well when Donnie awakens from his dream state and enters his trance state, at 8:23 what is visible is the Led Zeppelin album label image for Swan Song, which features an image of Lucifer falling, next to the upside down flag, signifying nation in distress. I am speculating here, but perhaps the two images are linked. Perhaps not. Regardless, the Lucifer and eye imagery is prominent in the film throughout, as we will see. Consider again the two prominent images in Donnie’s room. Recall that it is the engine that will “fall” through the roof – right where the image of Satan is. Without getting into too much speculation, the All-seeing eye is sometimes associated with Lucifer or Satan, but it generally depends on the context and intent, since it is also used to refer to the omniscience of the true God. Solomon speaks of God’s all-seeing eye in the Proverbs. Egyptians applied the image to Horus as a symbol of the divine attribute of omniscience. Point being, it means different things, but in modern masonic and Satanic culture, it is often applied to Lucifer:

We see at the dinner scene that the family is dysfunctional – the father is not a father, and will remain passive throughout the film, as the mother runs the family and the children are rebellious and profane. This relates to the film’s criticism of 80s culture, especially its backward, hypocritical suburban morality. Note at 5:53 we see the Escher drawing of the eye prominently displayed, and as many know, in the reflection of the pupil, is death. Death will be a major theme in the film, but not just the generic notion of death, but death from a particularly Jungian and gnostic perspective. Consider as well when Donnie awakens from his dream state and enters his trance state, at 8:23 what is visible is the Led Zeppelin album label image for Swan Song, which features an image of Lucifer falling, next to the upside down flag, signifying nation in distress. I am speculating here, but perhaps the two images are linked. Perhaps not. Regardless, the Lucifer and eye imagery is prominent in the film throughout, as we will see. Consider again the two prominent images in Donnie’s room. Recall that it is the engine that will “fall” through the roof – right where the image of Satan is. Without getting into too much speculation, the All-seeing eye is sometimes associated with Lucifer or Satan, but it generally depends on the context and intent, since it is also used to refer to the omniscience of the true God. Solomon speaks of God’s all-seeing eye in the Proverbs. Egyptians applied the image to Horus as a symbol of the divine attribute of omniscience. Point being, it means different things, but in modern masonic and Satanic culture, it is often applied to Lucifer:

It’s important to know as well that in most films, the details are crucial. Directors and producers place things there for a reason — acute attention is given to details. And, if you watch DVD commentaries, you will see them often speak of this. It is significant that Frank, the dead spirit that possesses Donnie, communicates at midnight. Midnight is associated in many traditions with liturgical actions, and presumably in the occult as well. We read in Stoker’s Dracula: × × “It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?”

The spirits of the dead and demons commune at midnight, and this is when Frank speaks to Donnie, especially as we move closer to Halloween, which will be very significant. That is when Donnie’s “world” will end, as Frank explains, when he first speaks to Donnie in a trance. Again, speculating here, but the

It ends with the line from “The Killing Moon” song, ‘fate, up against your will; he will wait until you give yourself to him.” The classical hero had to face up to his face and survive it with stoic resolve. That is one

first list of numbers are all composed of or can total 666. Six, in gematria, is the number of man, and in the Apocalypse of St. John, the number of the Beast. Frank says “28 days, 6 hours, 42 mins, 12 seconds” and the world will end. 8-2 is 6, 6 hours, 4+2 is 6, and 12 is 6 + 6. With the level of depth and thought put into the film, I don’t think this is a stretch, though I have no way to prove it, of course.

explanation of the film. Below, Jake Gyllenaal speaks about the film’s journey and how essential the self-individuation process was to the final product of Donnie Darko: × × “For my personally, when approacing the role, it was sort of hard to figure out because there’s so many things that he gets hit with. I think Donnie is what he comes in contact with.”

It is also significant that as the engine crashes into the house, the father is watching the Bush/Dukakis debate of 1988 and is totally invested in the neo-connery. We know that what was really going on in Nicaragua and elsewhere was drug running, as the Iran-contra scandal showed. The great irony here is that Donnie is drugged up, and experiencing serious spiritual problems, while the “war on drugs” was just getting started. The establishment is shown to be a fraud, and this anti-establishment theme runs throughout the film, because Donnie isn’t a hero in the traditional sense. He is a dark hero – if a hero at all. In fact, I suspect he is a kind of “Satan-hero.”

× × “In the simplest terms, and most abstract terms, I wouold say it’s a journey about discovering who you are and the irony o the whokle thing is hopefully in the end, it’s not only Donnie who realizes it, but the audience in a way — and they have to go back and they have to watch it again, and then they watch it again. But it’s just this ridiculous fantastic, completely absurd, and completely naturalistic and realisitc. A mixture of humor, like sadness comedy and madness rolled up in this ball like a crazy story/journey.”

The school’s mascot is the “mongrels,” which carries the connotation of retardation and idiocy. The teachers and principal are all duped members of the establishment who fall for self-help guru, Jim Cunningham’s scam, “Attitudinal Beliefs.” The “Cunning Vision” production of “Controlling Fear” is hilariously awesome, but it also has a deeper sense, since a person of “cunning” is someone who has pyschic or occult powers, and Donnie is the visionary prophet of the film. It’s also significant that the woman who was a prisoner of her fear looked “through the mirror to see the reflection of her own Ego.” This will be crucial when we consider the other instances of Donnie seeing his Ego’s image in the mirror — Frank.

× × “It forces you, if it does force you at all, to come to your own conclusions about what it’s about, and that’s the coolest thing—it’s an individual experience for each person. It’s not about one thing, which I think think the coolest thing about talking about it is that no one can really come to any finite or objective conclusion.” × × “It’s interesessting to get both perspective. You see her, you work with her as an actress, and as a fewllow actor, and then you work with her on a business level too. To watch her work, it’s funny because, you know, because ‘Ike, Turner,’ I say ‘god, if they don’t give me another take.’ And there’s a part of her that wants to say ‘we need another take, another part in this,’ but together, we’re kind of like ‘we shouldn’t, we need to move on.’ You know, so there’s this balance, and she works those two brilliantly.”

Frank, who begins to take a larger picture in Donnie’s life, is Donnie’s Ego, which, in Jungian analysis, must be integrated into the waking self. In this gnostic theory, the self is not whole until it reconciles all dualities into itself. The archetypes must be reconciled, or they will control us, Jung argued. In Donnie’s progress at his psychiatrist’s office, he goes deeper and deeper into his subconscious, and the therapist finally pulls Frank out, who we learned, was, for Donnie, “god.” But Donnie also can’t make sense of this rationally, and argues that God doesn’t make sense, and that perhaps raw materialism and atheism are the case, but in the end, he’d rather not debate it, because Frank is leading him. If his world ends, the therapist tell him, it will only be Donnie and God/Frank. Frank, you recall, is Donnie’s Ego – his mirror image, and is the personification of Donnie’s fear of death. Remember – this is all an alternate reality where Donnie has asserted his will in the face of what he fears is raw determinism. Instead of predestination, he has opted to fight his dark shade (Frank, in Jungian lingo), who is both a devil figure and a good deity. For evidence of this, consider this short explanation of Jung’s individuation process and then listen to Jake Gyllenhaal’s

Donnie is what he comes in contact with – the manifestations in the film are elements of his subconscious he must reconcile. That is not to say they are not real, as is the case with Inception, which has a very similar plot, and as I layed out here in my analysis. I disagree with Jake – I think we can tease out what the objective meaning is, more or less. Jena Malone plays Gretchen Ross, Donnie’s girlfriend. When she arrives, she becomes the love interest, and will function to wake Donnie up. This is precisely the function of the Anima and/or mother archetype. It would be tempting to say Donnie’s mother is the mother archetype, but she plays a minor role, so I suspect the two archetypes of anima and mother are combined in Gretchen, since she awakens Donnie. But lets back up. When Donnie arrives at school and we have the iconic scene where Tears for Fears plays, the camera is noticeably sideways. This clues

us in, both to the sideways nature of this alternate world, as well as the sideways, out of kilter nature of the school itself. The entire social structure is askew, and Donnie is apparently the only one who has the guts to point this out. This is why Donnie is anti-hero. The link to the Satanic/Luciferian nature of Donnie is found in the key scene where he explains the meaning of the Graham Greene story, The Destructors, that “destruction is a form of creation.” This is the mindset of the darkest of the dark – since reality is determined by brute force and raw materiality in an irresistible causal chain that cannot be broken, all actions are thus levelled and ontologically the same. There is thus no good or evil – all acts are part of the “machine,” and recall that Donnie will say to the bully at the end, “Deus ex Machina” or God from the machine. The world, Donnie struggles to accept, appears to be a determined machine. Since this is the case, burning down Old Misery’s house is qualitatively no different from destruction. This constitutes the most Satanic/gnostic element in the film. Recall as well that Graham Greene was a British intelligence agent, working for MI6.

name for Israel, so in terms of occult lore, it is a spirit in Judaism and gnosticism. See the hyperlink for all the associations, many of which could be relevant for Donnie Darko. Of particular note is the “wrathful” conception of “Ariel” from the gnostic text, the Pistis Sophia, which pictures “Ariel” as a destructive spirit — precisely what Donnie is. Wikipedia says (accurately): ” Ariel has been portrayed as a destructive spirit of retribution. In the Coptic Pistis Sophia, Ariel is in charge of punishment in the lower world, corresponding with Ur of the Mandeans. (Possibly due to Ariel’s association with the Archangel Uriel who is often equated with Ur and said to serve the same role.) Both Ariel’s leonthromorphic and destructive attributes have led to associations with the deities Nemesis and Sekhmet, among others. However, Ariel’s position as a spirit of wrath seems to be more in keeping with Judeo-Christian tradition of heavenly servitude. Ariel is usually depicted as a controller and punisher of demons or wicked spirits rather than a general retributive force.”

Donnie is drugged by BigPharma, and as a result of this, he continues to have intense experiences of synchronicity, communication with the dead spirit, Frank, and visions of the future. In the famous scene where Donnie talks to Frank in the movie theater during Evil Dead, Frank responds that Donnie “wears a stupid human suit.” In one of the debates with Monitoff, Donnie was told that bodies are “vessels that travel along vectors in spacetime.” So Donnie is inhabited by the spirit of dead Frank, but since this is a gnostic/ Jungian film, the external world is not a real, objective reality, but rather a projection of the psyche and the subconscious desires that are yet to be integrated. Since Donnie has not reconciled good and evil in himself, as well as male and female, and all dualities, he is presented as a “prisoner of fear” – ironically showing the Cunning Visions self-help infomercials to be *correct. This is a masterful use of irony and humor. But again, when I say “correct” only within the gnostic/Jungian paradigm – not correct in reality. Significant also is the fact that when Donnie leaves the movies, we see the sign for “The Last Temptation of Christ” playing, cluing us in that Donnie is a kind of anti-Christ hero – a gnostic savior, as the “Jesus” figure of the Last Temptation was in fact an unorthodox, gnostic/Nestorian portrayal of Christ.

Donnie, when he saves Gretchen, his Ariel, and has sex with her, reconciles with the anima and lets loose his sexual repression, which he had expressed under hypnosis to his therapist. Gretchen is his Ariel, and his anima. It is when he unites with her that he then sees his destiny (at midnight), and it is when he looks into her soul that he sees his destiny – “cellar door.” And so we end with a rupture in the subconscious of others as a result of Donnie’s death. It is as if they dreamed the alternate world Donnie constructed where he was the anti-hero, and they are noticeably distraught at his death on Halloween. So Donnie’s alternate world is one of fiction, and the reality is that one must face one’s fate stoically. So the film presents us with two false alternatives – a world where one is a Crowleyan/Nietzschian dark hero who does as he lists, wreaking havoc, or a world where we are determined by purely brute natural forces. Is it better to be Donnie Darko, the dark hero who burns down the establishment, doing some good in the process, like exposing Jim Cunningham, the self-help guru, as a pornographer, and ultimately killing two friends, or is it better to be a stoic acceptee of fate – to be that kid who died a crazy death in high school? So it does devolve back to the free will, predestination debate, but only to pose it in the context of the occult – will you be the overman, the anti-hero, the Satanic Saint, or will you be the obscure nobody? A gnostic, false dichotomy indeed.

Donnie sees a vision where the school is flooded, and Frank leads him to bust the water line, causing school to be out the next day. As a result, he is able to ask Gretchen out, and they “go together.” We see Samantha Darko, Donnie’s little sister, reading a poem titled “The Last Unicorn.” The unicorn’s name is Ariel, and is saved by a prince named “Justin,” who is translated to another world of “magic and wonder.” The poem seems irrelevant and out of place, unless we understand that this alternate world is Donnie’s alternate world where he (Justin) saves the unicorn (Ariel). Recall also that in Scripture, ‘Ariel’ is another

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vi.

DARK COMEDY

Dr. Strangelove

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Based on Release date Run time Budget Box office

Stanley Kubr ick Stanley Kubr ick Stanley Kubr ick, Ter r y Souther n, Peter George Red Aler t by Peter George Januar y 29. 1964 94 minutes $1.8 million $9.4 million

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This classic film from the auteur of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Shining (1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) remains a bit of a paradox. It’s a comedy concerning deeply unfunny matters, particularly nuclear war...and the end of the human race. However, the film didn’t start out as an absurd comedy. In fact, the movie’s screenplay is based on a serious, carefully-researched Cold War literary thriller from author Peter George.

mine-shafts, an American eugenics program, and a ratio of ten women to every man... While generals, politicians and scientists debate that particular (ludicrous) future and their roles in it, this world, our world — comes to an end in a series of fiery (but oddly beautiful...) nuclear mushrooms. Bombs explode in a gorgeous montage, to the tune “We’ll Meet Again”...

However, as history records, when Kubrick started investigating how easy it would be to trigger an accidental global nuclear war, the director registered and collated the “absurdities” involved in the doomsday scenario. Those absurdities became the bedrock of a new script...and a blistering satire was born.

In case you can’t tell from that synopsis, Dr. Strangelove is a cold, bleak movie with a black, merciless, unforgiving heart. As a form, satire is often cold and dispassionate, so this approach is to be expected to some degree. But Kubrick’s film work almost ubiquitously features an icy, cerebral disposition all its own, a fact which makes Dr. Strangelove doubly chilling.

In its new format Dr. Strangelove is a black comedy of human errors, serving specifically as a scathing critique of something utterly irrational: an entire (profitable...) industry and hierarchy devoted to the destruction of our very species. Kubrick’s targets in Dr. Strangelove are politicians, soldiers, the press, intellectuals...even the scientific community itself. All of these folks dutifully play their assigned (incompetent) roles in the film’s Global Annihilation, just cogs in a vast machine devoted to the End of Life on Earth as We Know It.

With an unflinching eye and total lack of compassion, Kubrick walks the audience through nuclear apocalypse and is so blunt, so matter-of-fact, so unforgiving in his depiction of the fools causing this disaster that we have no choice but to laugh. The bigger the disaster...the more we laugh. This occurs, in part, because we register the utter absurdity of the situation; and it dawns on us (slowly at first) that we have no one to blame...but ourselves. This is the world we made. So Nuclear Armageddon is nigh, and stiff-upper lipped British exchange officer Mandrake (Sellers once more...) doesn’t have enough small change to call the President on a pay phone and provide the recall code that could avert disaster.

As you may recall, Dr. Strangelove involves a plot by psychotic U.S. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), stationed at Burpleson Air Force Base. Ripper transmits false orders —“Wing Attack Plan R” to a fleet of B52s comprising America’s “Airborne Alert Force,” instructing them to drop their nuclear payloads across the Soviet Union.

So General Turgidson (George S. Scott) chews gum incessantly during a Pentagon Briefing and suggests that if nuclear war can’t be averted then Hell, we should try to win it!

Unfortunately, Ripper is also the only man with the correct recall code, an inconvenient fact which necessitates some high-level one-on-one telephone diplomacy between daft American President Muffley (Peter Sellers) and drunken Soviet Premier Kisov (pronounced Kiss Off).

So a B52 pilot is seen studying something (off-screen with extreme scrutiny in the cockpit of his war plane... but a reverse angle reveals not the complex workings of technology, but a Playboy Centerfold.

Meanwhile, aboard one airborne B52, Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) breaks through the Russian defense net and prepares to drop two nuclear bombs on Russian targets, blissfully unaware the world is not really at war. When the bomb bay doors jam, the patriotic Kong activates them manually...and exuberantly rides a warhead down to its terrestrial target. Yee Haw!

So an idiot foot soldier, “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn) distrusts the heroic Mandrake because he is British (and possibly a “prevert”). So Gauno worries at a time of international crisis about shooting a vending machine because he’s afraid to answer to “The CocaCola Company.” So the President himself is an Egghead Intellectual. He can’t even bring himself to inform the Russian Premier what’s occurred (“He went and did something silly, Dmitri...”).

But there’s another level to this global crisis. Even one nuclear detonation on CCCP soil will trigger the Soviet Union’s new “doomsday machine,” a defensive device that will eradicate all human and animal life on Earth.

So His generals are warmongers and lunatics (paging General Boykin!), the Russians get all their inside information from The New York Times, and Dr. Strangelove is an unrepentant Nazi who twice mistakenly calls President Muffley “Mein Fuhrer.”

Still, all is not lost. President Muffley’s scientific advisor, the wheel-chair bound German, Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers again), offers a contingency plan if tomorrow is indeed doomsday. It involves retrofitted

Everyone involved in this debacle, it seems, is a dolt.

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These men aren’t exactly profiles in courage (and, perhaps by design, there’s only one woman who appears in the film, landing blame squarely on the less-fair sex...).

care” and “this side down.” Again, there’s a method to the madness: Kubrick is showing us how we have turned the most horrifying weapons of mass destruction into things that we (mistakenly) believe are safe.

What one can detect so clearly here in Dr. Strangelove is a deranged patriarchy of destruction and blood lust marching blithely along, literally on “auto pilot,” ready to spur worldwide destruction...even if no nation (and no official government...) consciously seeks such destruction. With sharp eye, and sharper dialogue, Kubrick exposes a seemingly-basic quality of men: his compulsive flirtation with self-destruction. That flirtation is even more dangerous in the Cold War Age of computers, ICBMs, and other modern “conveniences.” The machines don’t cause the end of the world; they just make the end of the world that much easier for men to accidentally start.

Oh yes, handle that nuclear warhead with care! But a nuclear bomb is not a carton of cigarettes: it can do significantly more damage than the label indicates. And, as Kubrick seems to remind us here, some people in politics and the military have forgotten that fact. We have taken for granted the power of the weapons we have created, and done little to assure that they don’t come back and bite us on the ass. Dr. Strangelove is a film that likely couldn’t even be produced in today’s conservative climate because -among other things -- it plainly mocks some aspects of the military mentality. And if America is unanimously about anything these days, it’s mindlessly “supporting the troops.” No matter what their particular endeavor. No matter what their orders.

Kubrick gets terrific performances out of his cast here, particularly the multi-talented Peter Sellers, but equally memorable is his ironic use of music. “We’ll Meet Again” is a paean to man’s cycle of war and death, which never seems to end. “Try a Little Tenderness” transforms a mid-air warplane refueling procedure into something akin to robot sexual intercourse, and “Johnny Comes Marching Home” is continuously played to mock the blind patriotism of “our boys” on their fool’s errand.

But God Bless the late Kubrick for pointing out, rightly, that the military is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, only as good as the orders it executes. Importantly, Dr. Strangelove depicts both an obstructionist ignoramus, his “boots on the ground,” Bat Guano and a bat-shit crazy General, Jack D. Ripper, who launches a nuclear war because he tends to feel inferior about...something personal; something in the bedroom. The personal deficits of these men have consequences for the world. Again, the point is made concisely (and in amusing fashion): a soldier must not just blindly follow orders; but follow the right orders. The old excuse “I was just following orders” doesn’t quite cut the mustard when the scenario involves global nuclear apocalypse.

If the sound design of Dr. Strangelove is undeniably brilliant, Kubrick’s mastery of images is even more so. The now-famous composition of Slim Pickens riding a nuclear warhead like a bucking bronco at a rodeo is fully part of the American pop culture lexicon at this point. However, it actually says something important about our country too. It reveals how the American “cowboy” mentality has become dangerously coupled with frightening, destructive technology. Swaggering machismo and technological terror are a bad combination, as we’ve seen in the years since Dr. Strangelove...and Kubrick understood that fact at a relatively early date. Kubrick’s War Room (created by frequent James Bond production designer Ken Adam) is another memorable image: the ultimate smoke-filled room; the ultimate boy’s club. There are technological toys and blinking lights aplenty (like General Turgidson’s beloved “Big Board”) but nothing really gets accomplished here. The War Room is nothing but an elaborate sandbox, where the boy with the loudest voice holds sway. I also admire the language of Dr. Strangelove. The U.S. Army has a motto in the film: “Peace is Our Profession.” Yes, it’s absolutely Orwellian, and again, we’ve had some experience with that in recent years. And if the events of the movie are any indication of that slogan’s veracity, then the Army is utterly incompetent.

Kubrick’s targets are many here, but I believe he reserves his most egregious contempt for the macho military man. Dr. Strangelove’s opening shot is of a phallus-shaped warplane nose as it refuels in mid-air. That love song (“Try a Little Tenderness”) plays over the refueling process and you realize that perhaps this is indeed what “love” is in the Cold War Epoch. Men who can’t love, who only love killing, have created machines that love because they can’t. They have recreated the “act” of love, subconsciously, in the design and activities of their glorified war machines. You can see how this conceit plays out again in relation to Jack D. Ripper, the man who precipitates the global nuclear war. More than anything, he fears “loss of essence,” and that the Russians are out to steal “precious” American “bodily fluids.” He informs Mandrake that he does not avoid women, but that he “denies” them his “essence” (meaning semen). Again, the idea seems to be that certain macho men compensate for certain sexual failings... with killing, with bloodshed, with war.

I also love how the B52’s “auto destruct” well, auto-destructs, and how the nuclear warheads are obsessively labeled with such legends as “handle with

Gaze just below the surface and you can see how sex and sexual dysfunction are the subtext of Dr.

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Strangelove, not merely in the graphic “refueling” shot, but in the very names of the dramatis personae. President “Muffley” is a pussy, literally and metaphorically. “Kisov” is Kiss Off. Major Kong rides a bomb to impact... another substitution, perhaps, for the sexual act. General Turgidson even speaks of sex in terms of military terminology, telling his mistress to start a “countdown” until Old Bucky Turgidson “blasts off.” Given this surfeit of sexual imagery and allusion, the final images of Dr. Strangelove perhaps represent a collective orgasm of sorts; the explosive release of all the anger, hostility and hatred these swaggering cowboys have held inside for so long; a nuclear ejaculation that takes down the whole world. If these men can’t love — if they can’t create, they will destroy. All of us. Countdown to blast off, honey, we’re all gonna ride that missile...

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The Big Lebowski

Directed by Produced by Screenplay by Release date Run time Budget Box office

Joel Coen Ethan Coen Ethan Coen, Joel Coen March 6, 1998 117 minutes $15 million $46.1 million

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It’s 10 years since the release of The Big Lebowski, a film that split cinema audiences down the middle but created a strange cult. Is The Dude a slacker prince for our times? Not everybody likes The Big Lebowski. The Big Lebowski is a cult film. That is to say, not everybody likes it but those who do, in the main, have a special relationship with it.

“It is fun to drink and bowl,” says Mr Russell, co-author of I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski. And they are all united into one temporarily tight-knit community by their love of the film. It’s a key element in cult appeal. Not just loving something, but also relishing the fact that not everybody does. × × “The characters are so loveable and it is a really quotable movie. Not everybody gets it. A lot of people see the movie and they don’t like it. Other people fall in love with it. It was considered a flop at the time. Titanic was in its 20th week and it still beat the Big Lebowski. US Marshals beat it.”

When it was released, as the follow-up to the Coen brothers’ well-regarded and academy-impressing Fargo, many critics found themselves underwhelmed. Fargo was a film that hung together well - tightly paced and plotted, full of dark humour and moments of pathos. The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, could be viewed as two hours of wild self-indulgence, packed to the gills with bowling, White Russian cocktails, and swearing.

But neither have the quotability of The Big Lebowski. At the festival the “achievers” - as the fanatics of the film call themselves, after the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers mentioned in the movie - shout “nice marmot” or “careful man, there’s a beverage here”. John Goodman’s character, Walter Sobchak, provides many of the most glorious lines with his preposterous ruminations on his experiences in Vietnam such as:

Variety said it “doesn’t seem to be about anything other than its own cleverness”, while the LA Times moaned that the “story line is in truth disjointed, incoherent and even irritating”. Even its staunchest fan would have to say the plot, a pastiche of a Chandler or Hammett mystery, takes a little decoding. The central character is Jeff Lebowski, aka The Dude, who has his rug urinated on by thugs, setting off a complicated chain of events.

× × “This is not Nam, this is bowling, there are rules.”

Regular swearing The fans love the glorious level of deadpan wit. In one scene the two protagonists enter a house and see a famous TV writer ensconced in an iron lung, his laboured breathing audible across the room. And then there is the swearing. Mr Russell estimates the F-word is used 281 times.

Power of quotability In 1998 the film failed, initially at least, to set the box office on fire. The flicks were then being bestrode by Titanic, a big sentimental monster of a replica-ship melodrama. The ordinary cinemagoer preferred Celine Dion’s heart going on, and Kate Winslet threatening to jump to a watery grave, to the antics of a bearded slacker in Los Angeles.

× × “Does he still write?”, they ask the woman who answers the door. “No, no, no, he has health problems,” she replies.

But while The Big Lebowski did not initially put bums on seats, it was not a total turkey and proved something of a very slow-burn hit, particularly on DVD. It became a popular choice for midnight screenings. Fans liked to go along and quote the dialogue. It was perhaps not surprising when four years after its release, it spawned Lebowski Fest, a chain of conventions, centred on Louisville, Kentucky, celebrating the film. There have even been Lebowski celebrations in the UK.

Lou Harry, author of the as-yet-unpublished Behind the Screen: The Big Lebowski, says the film’s appeal lies in its “compulsive rewatchability”. × × “It is in a line of Coen Brothers films - it has the same quirkiness and unexpected 180 degree turns until you have seen it 17 times. It does that in a way that is satisfying.”

With a marijuana-smoking burned out hippie as the protagonist, it’s easy to place The Big Lebowski as one of the forerunners of today’s wave of slacker comedies like Knocked Up, Pineapple Express and The Wackness. But its place is really in the line of under-appreciated-at-time-of-release cult films - a list featuring everything from Tod Browning’s Freaks to Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The Big Lebowski is of an era where fanatics find it easier to discover the shared nature of their fanaticism thanks to the internet and now, to social networking. The result is the continuance of the concept of “cult”.

× × “The first night we watch the movie, the second night we become the movie,” says Will Russell, who describes himself as “co-founding dude” of the Lebowski Fest.

At the annual events, fans dress up as the Dude himself, or as crazed Vietnam veteran Walter Sobchak, German nihilists, purple-clad Jesus Quintana, bowling pins, Valkyries and even as the dancing landlord. Then they read quotations to each other, much as might be seen at a Monty Python convention.

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vii.

DOCUMENATRY

Grey Gardens

Directed by Produced by Release date Run time

Alber t Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer Alber t Maysles, David Mayskes September 27, 1975 95 minutes

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Like most of the best things in life -- opera, wine, meditation, anal sex -- the weird world of Grey Gardens is an acquired taste. And as with many acquired tastes, the first sip makes quite an impression. When I first saw the film in college, my reactions were shock and dismay at what felt like exploitative invasion of privacy, a mockery of two sadly deranged women. “I tell people, ‘You may not like it the first time,’È‚f;” explains Michael Sucsy about the 1975 Maysles Brothers documentary. Over the past few years, Sucsy has researched, written, and directed a new dramatic film, also titled Grey Gardens , starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the mother and daughter who shared an East Hampton, N.Y., house (Grey Gardens) and a name (Edith Bouvier Beale) for about 25 years too long. In the process of creating the film, which premieres April 18 on HBO, he got used to people reading his script (or seeing a rough cut of the film) and saying they now wanted to see the Maysles version. In each of these instances, Sucsy, who had the same reaction I did when he first saw the ‘75 documentary, warned everyone that they might be disappointed -- at first. It takes repeated viewings of the film to truly understand why it’s become, as University of Sussex film professor John David Rhodes describes it, a “rite of passage for gay men.” (Rhodes remembers how in 1992, on his first night in New York, his gay uncle took him to Kim’s Video on Bleecker Street to get the tape.) Spotting the camp beneath the train wreck is crucial to honing the camp sensibility that’s as much a part of the urban gay man’s development as big biceps-augmenting the movie-queen Grand Guignol curriculum of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Mommie Dearest . “It was one of the films that all of us quoted to each other,” Rhodes says. “It served as a kind of recondite, East Village version of camp, classical Hollywood.” Still, you don’t need a degree in queer theory to see the attractions: Little Edie’s famous, madcap approach to wardrobe; her equally hilarious flair for conversation, in which, like her clothing, she melds the utterly practical and sublimely absurd; and the fact that she was Jackie Kennedy’s first cousin. What gay man wouldn’t identify with someone who wore outlandish outfits, starred in her own movie, and was related to (and prettier than) Jackie? “The Revolutionary Costume for Today” -- Edie’s highly hummable fashion manifesto from the 2006 Grey Gardens Broadway musical -- packed all three of these, Little Edie’s biggest charms, into one big bringdown-the-house number that leapt into the camp hall of fame right next to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “I’m the Greatest Star.” The musical’s success also underscored just how mainstream camp has become. Since the Criterion Collection DVD release of the documentary in

2001, Grey Gardens and Little Edie are anything but recondite. In 2003 the movie was number 33 on Entertainment Weekly’s list of the top 50 cult films. If the list were published today, Gardens would easily make the top 10. The Grey Gardens musical defied cynics to make it to Broadway, where it was a hot ticket and has spawned other major productions around the world. There are now Grey Gardens books, fan sites, Facebook pages, fashion lines, and homemade YouTube videos. In 2005 the original inspired what may have been the first documentary about a documentary, Ghosts of Grey Gardens , and in 2006, Albert Maysles released a sequel cobbled from outtake reels, The Beales of Grey Gardens . Kent Bartram, a Chicago writer and researcher, is writing an exhaustive biography of Little Edie, uncovering more of the story’s strange complications and secrets, expected out in 2011. And Sucsy’s film reveals more explicitly the dramatic narrative that lurks beneath the surface of the Maysles Brothers’ films. But the camp is also something of a red herring. As divine as a kooky cross between Diana Vreeland and Lee Radziwill sounds, Drew Barrymore herself will tell you that Little Edie is far more complex. “She has this brilliant fashion sense and these great lines -- I don’t know a movie I quote more,” Barrymore says. “But when you go deeper than that, what’s there is a truly remarkable injured bird with the most amazing feathers.” Without the trappings of a single coherent narrative -- Little Edie would never be tied down to just one -- Grey Gardens is, in its mangled, tangled way, one of the clearest and most sophisticated expressions of gayness the world has created. “Gay men think they’re latching on to Grey Gardens because they think it’s camp, but it’s really because it’s about a parent-child relationship,” explains John Epperson, whose performance-art persona, Lypsinka, has turned the mimicry of movie-queen line readings into an art form of its own. “The best movies are always about identity, and that movie certainly is.” He draws a parallel to Imitation of Life , another gay favorite. The film is famous for Lana Turner’s overthe-top acting and costumes, but it’s the supporting story of the black maid and her daughter, Sarah Jane -- who can pass for white and tragically tries to -- that really resonates with gay viewers, Epperson says. Sarah Jane is like a gay man in that she’s trying to find a place in the world where she fits. Sucsy says he wasn’t trying to place his Grey Gardens film within the context of the old-school Hollywood women’s pictures; it just turned out that way. “I remember, it wasn’t that long ago, I was just catching up on my classics, and I rented Now, Voyager ,” he says. “It didn’t have anything to do with [my work on Grey Gardens ]. I started watching it, and I just thought, Oh, my God, the way the two overlap is eerie .”

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And the similarities don’t end with Bette Davis’s Now, Voyager . What’s surprising is how many other haunting mother-daughter stories there are in the gay cult canon: Stella Dallas , Mildred Pierce , Gypsy , Carrie , Female Trouble , Postcards From the Edge . Throw in the house mothers of Paris Is Burning too. Even films like Baby Jane and All About Eve (not to mention Showgirls ) are power struggles between two women trapped in a world somewhat of their own making, echoing the mother-daughter push-pull. “There’s a certain kind of identification with this mother and daughter who are locked together,” says Charles Busch, the playwright and performer whose play Die, Mommie, Die! -- later made into a film -- was a send-up of 1960s gay cult hits like Dead Ringer and Strait-Jacket . “Until recently, gay people, since they didn’t get married and didn’t have kids, often had unusually intense relationships with their parents. I was raised by my aunt, who during her last years was an invalid. I’d be making her lunch and she’d start in with the bell. I felt just like Baby Jane.” The Edie resonance goes even deeper than that, Sucsy says. While researching, he was struck by how closely Edie’s status during her time in New York -- young, single, and “bohemian” -- corresponded to that of gay men at the time. In his film, which alternates between re-created scenes of the filming of the ‘75 documentary and flashbacks of the Edies’ lives through the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, Little Edie is always longing to get away. First she evades her father’s desire for her to settle down and marry a nice rich WASP, and later she escapes Grey Gardens altogether.

Suddenly, Last Summer ; The Manchurian Candidate; and, most famously, Psycho were all painting portraits of weak but dangerous young men with troubling attachments to a forceful mother. Gay men and women today may identify with racial minorities, but for most of the past century, gays were lumped in with crazies, alkies, spinsters, and eccentrics -- they all ate at the same unmentionable table, preferably hidden. Barrymore, who comes from a famous family herself and whose own wild-child behavior has resulted in a headline or two, can relate -- but mostly to the Edies’ love-hate filial relationship. “In my experience the term apron strings doesn’t even begin to cut it,” she says. “There’s an insane amount of pain and guilt with mother-daughter relationships, and some people are eaten alive by it. It’s a really interesting dynamic.” Barrymore was also drawn to Little Edie’s freewheeling way of saying one thing and then coming back with the completely opposite point of view. This fast-twirling yin-yang of contradictions is something most people might attempt to hide behind a cool and composed facade. Not Edie. “I remember meeting with a studio executive once who said, ‘Look, I read your script, and frankly, this is full of contradictions,’È‚f;” Sucsy says. “That’s one of the things that was so amazing about Drew -- how she was excited by that. She really understood.” The most frequent (and poignant) of the contradictions is Little Edie’s wish to be married versus her desire to remain single and free. While superficially opposite, both betray the loneliness Edie felt as well as her sad suspicion that she was inherently too flawed to be loved.

Flamboyant, witty, and childlike -- traits that for years were ascribed, accurately or not, to gay men -- she tries and tries but, despite her enthusiasm, can’t make her way in New York City. She runs out on her social debut in the 1930s, has trouble holding a job in the 1940s, and embarks on an affair with a married man in the early 1950s.

The theme of contradiction is echoed in the house itself. Although broken-down and decrepit, Grey Gardens is right there in glamorous East Hampton, the cream of America’s summer resorts, less than 200 yards from one of the nation’s most desirable beaches. In many ways, gay people live that close to the country’s culture and may even go to that beach; but we are, in other ways, still as far away as Little Edie was.

“Part of [our attraction] is generational,” says Doug Wright, who wrote I Am My Own Wife and the book for the Grey Gardens musical. “In a closeted culture, there were no public figures who identified as gay. So many gay men came to see themselves in these high-functioning, artistically expressive, heartbreakingly single, and deeply neurotic women. That world undervalued [Edie’s] extravagant expressiveness, and she couldn’t find love in any successful way. If that doesn’t describe your average gay man, circa 1950, I don’t know what does. Our stories were closer to Stella Dallas than John Wayne.”

For all the heartbreak, though, the growing cult around Grey Gardens seldom dwells on the down spots, and the new film ends on a sweetly high note. Young gay men today are less likely to sing along to the bittersweet strains of “I Will Survive.” Today’s camp icons are characters like Cher Horowitz from Clueless , Elle Woods of Legally Blonde , and the gals from Sex and the City . So while there may not be much for them in the mother-daughter melodramas of yesterday, there’s plenty for fashion-besotted 20-somethings to be had in Little Edie and her take on style.

Even so, if you think it’s strange that gays should gravitate toward two women whom most people would call insane, remember this: It was only in 1973 -- around when David and Albert Maysles were first knocking on the Edies’ front door -- that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as mental illness. Little more than a decade earlier, films like

And that style, Barrymore explains, has a mystery all

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its own. “Cat and I would have to freeze-frame [the documentary] to figure out how [Little Edie] pinned things,” she says, referring to the film’s costume designer, Catherine Marie Thomas. “One time, it took us forever to figure what she’d done. It was two shirts, one worn as a shirt and one worn as a skirt -- with the arms wrapped around for a belt. These were extremely theatrical people. Life was a stage.” Robb Brawn, custodian of the fan site MyGreyGardens.com , agrees that Little Edie’s fashion sense was far from superficial. The two of them became friends in 1979, after Big Edie had died, Grey Gardens had been sold, and Little Edie moved to New York City to launch her long-dreamed-of, short-lived cabaret career. (She gave 16 performances at Reno Sweeney in the West Village.) “To me, Edie’s thing wasn’t just that it’s OK to be different -- and this was the 1970s, when it wasn’t OK,” Brawn says. “She was saying, ‘I’m not just here to be accepted, I want to be celebrated.’ They were happy in their own skin, she and Big Edie, being who they were, and that’s what a lot of gay people relate to. We shouldn’t have to explain why we’re here or be tolerated or accepted. We’re not all as philosophical as Edie, but we feel that way.” So why settle for Gloria, Mae, Joan, Bette, Judy, Rita, Katharine, Marilyn, Lana, Barbra, Faye, Liza, Sissy, Jessica, Meryl, or Madonna? Edie is all of them, stripped down to one sparkling, hilarious talent yearning to be loved and applauded. And brimming over, as she always is, with the fervent hope that tomorrow will be different and with the nagging fear that it won’t be, she is also, so clearly, all of us.

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2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY THE BIG LEBOWSKI BLADE RUNNER A CLOCKWORK ORANGE DAZED AND CONFUSED DONNIE DARKO DR. STRANGELOVE E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL ERASERHEAD THE EVIL DEAD FIGHT CLUB GREY GARDENS HEATHERS JAWS THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH MEAN GIRLS NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD PYSCHO ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW THE ROOM