It can be disappointing to read what great filmmakers have to say about their movies. But rarely has a director seemed to misunderstand his own work as completely as Elia Kazan, in a lengthy interview about his sole comedy, Baby Doll (1956), that appears in Jeff Young’s book Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films. “It has no meaning,” he claimed. “By the time I got to Baby Doll, I was determined to make a picture with no sympathy and no heroes.”

Kazan appears to be describing a very different film from the one he made. Set in a small Mississippi Delta town just months before Brown v. Board of Education made segregated public schools illegal, and scripted by Tennessee Williams (with lots of uncredited assistance from Kazan), Baby Doll is essentially a Southern Gothic three-hander. Carroll Baker, who also appeared in the George Stevens classic Giant in 1956, plays the title character, a beautiful 19-year-old who’s married to the hapless, middle-aged cotton gin owner Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden). Their union is the result of a tragedy and a lie: Baby Doll’s ailing father wanted to ensure her financial security before he died, and Archie Lee led the terminally ill man to believe he could give her a life of luxury. Now, the unhappy couple dwells in a squalid, crumbling mansion. Because Archie Lee promised Baby Doll’s father that he wouldn’t touch her before her 20th birthday, the marriage remains unconsummated—and everyone in town seems to know it.

Two days before that date, the furniture the Meighans have purchased on an installment plan gets hauled away for nonpayment and Baby Doll threatens to move out. A desperate Archie Lee burns down a new cotton gin that has stolen all of his business so that his rickety contraption will once again be the only game in town. Their bizarre love triangle is completed when his rival, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach, in his first major film role), a Sicilian from Corpus Christi, arrives at the Meighans’ to drop off the cotton he can no longer process. Vacarro has no doubt that Archie Lee set the fire, and when a good ol’ boy cop refuses to investigate an outsider’s “reckless” charges, he decides to handle the matter himself. “I come from a very old country where it’s tradition for every man to make his own justice,” says Vacarro. He’s also shrewd enough to realize that if he wants a confession, he’s best off going through Baby Doll.

Williams’ script, based on his plays 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Unsatisfactory Supper, is a master class in character creation. Baker, Wallach and Malden (who’d already won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for another Kazan collaboration, A Streetcar Named Desire), all Actors Studio alums, fully inhabit their rich roles. Sharp-tongued, imperious and naive, Baby Doll comes off as even younger than her 19 years. Archie Lee, a whiny drunk whose insecurity about his masculinity might stem from impotence, lies and commits arson out of a belief that, despite his lack of any discernible charm or skills, he deserves a thriving business and a gorgeous wife half his age. Although he’s slick and menacing on the surface, Vacarro’s true motives are harder to read.

Each represents a stereotype: the bratty ingénue, the entitled white man, the sneaky and enterprising immigrant. But, contrary to Kazan’s insistence that this black comedy has no overarching meaning or sympathy for its leads, Williams never lets us forget how deeply their roles in society have shaped these characters’ personalities and expectations about each other. For Baby Doll, Vacarro and even, to some extent, Archie Lee, identity is a trap.

Kazan didn’t see Baby Doll’s central trio as particularly complicated people. He claimed to identify most closely with the film’s nastiest character, Archie Lee, who he described to Young as a classic “middle-aged cuckold”: “pathetic, funny, amusing tragic.” Meanwhile, Vacarro is “as ridiculous as a rooster because you know tomorrow morning somebody’s going to go out there with an axe and cut his head off.” His dismissal of Baby Doll is particularly dispiriting. “I know a lot of girls who are like Baby Doll,” he told Young. “You say to yourself, ‘She’s such a bore.’ Fifteen minutes later you’re going to bed with her. ‘God, she’s a good kid. Oh boy, she’s a cute little animal.’ And you like her. You think, ‘What’s the difference what her ideas are?’”

The director’s appraisal of Archie Lee is solid, if incomplete, although the character doesn’t necessarily begin the film a cuckold. His biggest obstacle is that, as a white landowner, his expectations for his own life exceed his intelligence and abilities. Vacarro has the opposite problem: He’s smart and successful, but lives in a town that doesn’t take kindly to newcomers (or consider Sicilians white), where local police have no interest in protecting his property. What Kazan sees as Vacarro’s foolishness is actually desperation. Sure, he has a lot to lose by challenging Archie Lee. But his other option is to quietly absorb the destruction of his livelihood.  

Like Vacarro, Baby Doll is manipulative out of necessity, yet ultimately sympathetic. And she’s never boring. We first glimpse her, a minute or so into the film, asleep in an open crib. She’s clad in a style of nightgown now called a “baby doll dress” in the character’s honor, sucking her thumb. She awakens to the sight of sad, old Archie Lee carving a hole in the wall so that he can watch her. The scene looks tame now, but it’s remarkably explicit for its time, as the introduction to a movie that TIME pronounced “possibly the dirtiest American made motion picture that has ever been exhibited.” In fact, it was barely exhibited following the Catholic League of Decency’s crusade to keep it out of theaters, and is now most famous for the scandal it caused.

Soon enough, Archie Lee gropes—and maybe even attempts to rape—Baby Doll. We watch him walk into the bathroom where she’s in the tub. Because the Production Code Administration insisted that Kazan cut a shot of Archie Lee touching her while she’s bathing, the camera remains in the hallway as Baby Doll screams, “Get your hands off me!” The scene may have been meant as a lighthearted demonstration of a husband’s sexual frustration, but, six decades later, it reads as a much darker moment. Another early shot finds Baby Doll licking an ice cream cone as local men chuckle and leer at her, while a little girl sitting nearby eats her dessert unmolested. As an adult woman, even her most innocuous, childlike actions are sexualized.

When Vacarro arrives at the Meighans’ estate, such as it is, Baby Doll’s attraction to him is obvious. She looks wide awake, and flustered, for the first time in the film. Ostensibly assuming she won’t be hard to seduce, he takes advantage of her arousal, hoping he can sweet-talk her into incriminating her husband. While Archie Lee attempts to get his broken cotton gin working, Vacarro follows Baby Doll around their yard. Much of their dialogue is hilarious: When he offers her a pecan from a nearby tree, she proclaims, “I wouldn’t dream of eatin’ a nut a man had cracked in his mouth.” Clearly stifling a chuckle, he murmurs, “You’ve got many refinements.”  

At other moments, though, Vacarro seems to pose a physical threat to Baby Doll. In a rusting car on the Meighans’ lawn, he sits next to her and throws his leg across her body, trapping her inside. “Would you move your leg?” she pleads, more than once, before scrambling out of the vehicle. He crowds in beside her on a swing, puts his arm around her and picks a piece of cotton lint off the front of her shirt. He leans in, and she leans away. When she stands up, she goes weak in the knees. “The scene on the swings in Baby Doll is my exact idea of what eroticism in films should be,” Kazan told Young. But Baker has just as much fear in her eyes as excitement. Eventually, Baby Doll runs away and threatens to call out to a boy in the street. Then she appeals to Archie Lee, who slaps her, in front of his workers, for interrupting him.

The implication isn’t just that Vacarro might seduce Baby Doll, although her weakness and confusion in the face of a man she finds desirable all but prove she’s too inexperienced to be as promiscuous as Archie Lee, Vacarro and various townspeople seem to believe. Even if the Production Code wouldn’t allow Kazan and Williams to spell it out, it’s clear enough that she’s afraid he might rape her—and that stereotypes about swarthy foreigners contributes to that fear. After he sends her husband away on an unnecessary errand, they take turns chasing each other around the house, until Vacarro corners her in the Meighans’ falling-apart basement and forces her to sign an affidavit confirming Archie Lee’s guilt. It’s only after they regress back to childhood together, with Vacarro napping in the crib while she sings to him, that Baby Doll regains her composure. In that moment, he begins to genuinely fall in love with her.

Of course, when Archie Lee gets home, the tension between all three characters explodes. Vacarro taunts him with the prospect that their newly forged partnership will require Baby Doll to “entertain” the Sicilian on a daily basis. When she comes downstairs for dinner, she’s changed into a black dress that makes her look more grown up (and allies her with Vacarro, who also wears black). The new lovers kiss for what appears to be the first time while Archie Lee phones some influential friends who he hopes will help him permanently take out his rival. Their dinner abruptly ends with Archie Lee chasing Vacarro around the yard, shotgun ablaze, as Baby Doll calls the local police on her husband.

While the film never loses its comic tone, its resolution makes a much darker, more serious statement than Kazan acknowledged. As he’s being arrested, Archie Lee appeals to a cop—“from one white man to another”—to make sure Vacarro goes home and leave his wife alone. He obliges and assures the man he’s just caught attempting murder, “We gonna have to go through this thing for appearance’s sake.” It seems inevitable that Archie Lee will be released the next morning and that, when he is, he’ll come looking for Vacarro. Nothing is stopping him from killing the Sicilian; if he succeeds, he’ll get his wife and his business back. His buddies on the squad surely won’t bother to investigate the murder. Although Vacarro is the better man by every measure—as he tells Archie Lee at dinner, “I’m foreign, Meighan, but I’m not revengeful” —he can’t defeat small-town xenophobia.

And then there’s poor Baby Doll, who won’t know where her life is headed until one of these two potential rapists emerges victorious. “We got nothin’ to do but wait till tomorrow and see if we’re remembered or forgotten,” she tells her aunt, who serves as the Meighans’ incompetent live-in cook, in the film’s final line of dialogue. Baby Doll’s beauty, which probably seemed like an asset when her father married her off to a supposedly rich man, can’t liberate her—and she finally realizes that. This is as grim a view of women’s plight as you’ll see in pre-1960s cinema.    

It’s Williams’ multilayered script and Baker’s psychologically rich performance, along with Kazan’s singular ability to wring transcendent work out of his actors, that elevate the film beyond its director’s limited ambitions for the story. “You can’t take Baby Doll seriously,” Kazan admonished Young at one point in their interview. But, to his credit, you can.

There are certain generally held expectations about the relationship between reality as we live it every day and films set in a dystopian future. No one who has watched even a few minutes of cable news in the last decade or so could doubt that contemporary American life, in some ineffable and undeniable way, currently exists within one or more Paul Verhoeven films. But while the broad strokes generally rhyme, some crucial details don’t quite match up. The hearty tonal psychosis, relentless soul-deadening violence, and amorphously horny militarism are very much in place, but contemporary life still lags behind the Verhoevenverse in terms of extremely ambitious lapels on men’s suits, routine space travel, and robotic cop technology. Natural as it is to envy the efficient transit system of Cohaagen’s Mars or even just wish for a little more Renee Soutendijk in the monitors, this is generally good news.

There is one notable exception to the usual reality-to-dystopia ratio, though, that is both humbler and infinitely more unsettling. On September 11, 2006, Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was the most ambitious and expansive of the independent horror auteur’s career, and a long time in the making. Fessenden started writing the film in November of 2001; producer Jeff Levy-Hinte began shopping the script, on which Fessenden collaborated with the writer Robert Leaver, in 2003. It was a horror movie, but more specifically it was a Larry Fessenden Horror Movie, which is to say a doomy character-driven mood piece, with the dominant mood being Choking Dread. Also, it was about climate change, and set at a remote oil company outpost in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve where debates about the ethics of natural resource exploitation give way to something darker. It was not going to be an easy sale, in other words, and it did not sell. Levy-Hinte struck out with the larger independent studios.

“Every one of them said the movie would be a ‘tweeny,’” Fessenden told Indiewire in 2007, “in between genres—not horror, not drama—and passed.” The film was eventually financed with a grab-bag of private funding; after scouting locations in Alaska and Canada, Fessenden wound up shooting most of the film in Iceland, with the Icelandic Film Commission coming on as a co-producer. The production started in March of 2005, and the conditions during the three-week shoot mirrored the chaos in the film—“in subzero temperatures, or in un-seasonal rain, or winds of 40 knots, or blizzards, or a blistering sun,” Fessenden wrote in August of 2006. “Iceland is experiencing acutely the radical temperature shifts from global warming even today, and many of the outlandish scenarios in the script were actually occurring.” Fessenden immediately re-cut the film after its TIFF premiere; months later, IFC beat out a few competitors for the rights to it. “There was no bidding war,” Fessenden told Indiewire.

The Last Winter opened in a limited theatrical/streaming release in late September of 2007 and grossed less than a hundred thousand dollars worldwide. It’s perhaps the fullest realization to date of That Larry Fessenden Feeling, which connects an astute and engaged social consciousness with a certain freewheeling reverence for horror’s foundational myths. But, more to the point, The Last Winter holds a bleak record for dystopian films given how quickly its central conceit went from disturbing speculative fiction—literally the stuff of a horror film, albeit a low-key and dread-intensive independent one—to an observable, scientifically quantified fact. The Last Winter posited the melting of the Alaskan permafrost as an opening onto the end of everything else when it opened in six theaters in September of 2007. It was a little less than a decade before reality caught all the way up—to the first part, at least.

***

This is probably a good point to mention that the movie happens to be very good. It is indeed a “tweeny,” but that is the valuable and shrinking genre space in which Fessenden does what he does. He’s a horror movie director more or less by default, but he also seems to come by it naturally—in making a movie about the loss of self that comes with addiction, say, or the immutable and intractable aspects of class conflict, Fessenden wound up making an ace low-budget vampire movie (1995’s Habit) and a multiply haunted werewolf fable (2001’s Wendigo) that are all the more effective because of how discomfitingly comfortably the subject and fable fit together. This is a strange and difficult thing to pull off, but the connection between urgent, human-scale conflict and the broader mythic concerns never feels forced. Fessenden’s films are strangely and stubbornly themselves; it is as if only myth can quite explain the familiar and variously fraught real world borders along which his films are set.

All of this would seem to set Fessenden up as the ideal director for a horror movie about a topic that, for all its reeling apocalyptic sweep, is generally lived in the present through a series of picayune partisan skirmishes. The question is whether such a movie could in fact be made, and why there have been so few attempts. The most obvious reason why there have not been any good, scary movies about climate change also happens to be the most compelling: it’s just too fucking scary. The bigger studio features that have taken on the topic have been goofy both because they are bad, and because a less-goofy approach would make them something significantly darker than a big studio feature should be. Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) envisions climate change as a series of suspiciously gray-looking CGI effects conspiring to keep Dennis Quaid from reuniting with his son; at one point, Jake Gyllenhaal literally outruns an ice age and escapes it by slamming a heavy wooden door against a freezing polar wind. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), in which the world’s plants pursue a merciless allergy-inspired revenge against the human race, is more understated by default, but also exponentially dorkier and somehow even less frightening.

Neither of those filmmakers are ever going to make the signature film about any topic, but the twinned and overdetermined dippiness of those misbegotten epics helps explain both why The Last Winter works as well as it does and why so few films have taken up this particular challenge. In a formal sense, horror movies need rules; when those rules work, you’re both afraid enough in the moment and invested enough in the film’s internal logic not to be bothered by the idea that some towering and ravenous evil can be banished—or fought at least to a sequel-ready standstill—by deftly deployed Catholic kitsch or half-scientific gimcrackery or some bespoke incantation. Even in the most effectively dreamlike horror films, basic narrative structure matters, if only so the person watching knows what’s happening enough to know what to be afraid of.

Global warming just doesn’t work like that, as a film villain or in any other way. There are a number of reasons why even thoughtful people might recoil from thinking about what global warming is doing and will do to us. The vastness and implacability of it, the sense that the ship has in some meaningful sense already sailed, the dreadfulness of what we know and the formless and more dreadful prospect of what we don’t, the pure and prosaic horror of an annihilating force so much greater than us—these are scary, but this is the sort of fear that people go to the movies to avoid thinking about. Fessenden does not shy away from any of that, but this is why he is Larry Fessenden and, say, Roland Emmerich is not. It probably also has something to do with why The Day After Tomorrow made $544 million in domestic box office receipts and The Last Winter…did not.

***

Reviews, if you are curious, were generally very positive. The AV Club respected the craft, but thought The Last Winter was didactic to the point of bloodlessness, but Manohla Dargis evoked Val Lewton while giving the film something like a rave in the New York Times and John Anderson wrote in Film Comment that Fessenden “found something profoundly, metaphysically scary within the facts and figures of global warming.” Even Varietyliked it, while noting that it will “fare best in ancillary [markets].” The Last Winter opened in just six theaters in the United States, although IFC also made it one of the earliest films available for day-and-date streaming. It didn’t make a lot of money anywhere—Box Office Mojo has its total lifetime gross at $97,522, with nearly two thirds of that coming from overseas—but it was added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The Last Winter is, in short, just the sort of smart, scrappy, distinctive, deserving movie that disappears a few dozen times every year. It just somehow happens also to be the only good genre movie about climate change that has been made during the decades in which that phenomenon has shaped and threatened life on earth.

It is one thing to buy a ticket in order to be scared; it is another thing entirely to face down prosaic, literal, merciless and mirthless doom. The Babadook is a lot easier to face—and, not coincidentally, to visualize on a budget—than the horror that Fessenden puts forward in The Last Winter. “What if the very thing we were here to pull out of the ground were to rise out of the ground willingly and confront us?” James LeGros’ journalist-turned-environmental-consultant writes in his journal. “What would that look like?”

Visually, The Last Winter veers effectively between claustrophobic and unsettlingly horizonless. The Icelandic cinematographer G. Magni Ágústsson is precise with with the seasick institutional greens and smudgy whites and murky brown foods and general crushing linoleum vibe of the outpost’s interiors and disorientingly vast everywhere else, with exteriors defined by blanking expanses of shocking white and blue. The former replicates the bleak shitscape of grim paneling and frozen fluorescence that Fessenden and Levy-Hinte observed during their location scouting in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay; the latter is Iceland, playing itself. Jeff Grace’s musical score is lyrical where it intrudes, but there isn’t much of it; there is a great deal more of Anton Sanko’s (separately credited) ambient score, which is felt mostly through recursive tones and atonal gestures and the insistent sounds of wind and wings.

A killer cast grounds the film even as it becomes more digressive and hallucinatory. Ron Perlman swaggers and booms and sports a jaunty earring as an oil company factotum forced to confront the end of a business model that has plainly shaped his worldview, but allows enough doubt to suffuse his performance to keep him human; the script is not necessarily subtle and hardly ever lets Perlman be anything but wrong, but he’s not a villain or even a fool so much as another helpless person caught well out over his skis. LeGros makes for a low-key counterpoint to Perlman’s brashness, but his intelligence registers strongly enough throughout that the character gains authority as everything around him frays. The plot sets Connie Britton’s Abby up as a point of romantic contention between the two, but because the character is played by Connie Britton she emerges as significantly more than that—smarter than just about anyone else in the film, and savvy enough to know it and not to give it away. Her Friday Night Lights cast-mate Zach Gilford has a smaller but more pivotal part, and is exactly as haunted as he needs to be. Dillon Panthers completists will be happy to know that Gilford plays football during a drunken game of two-hand touch at the outpost, albeit in more of a scatback role than the game-managing quarterback one that he was playing alongside Britton on Friday Night Lights at the time. (For fantasy football players: Britton also scores during that game, on a rather incongruously well-designed screen play.)

How scary this all is depends on what you look for in your Being Scared experience. The back half of the film delivers some effective conventional shocks, aided to various degrees by some fairly literal CGI effects, but the first half establishes just how good Fessenden is at the strange thing that he does. As in the best moments of Wendigo, the anxieties inherent in his chosen themes—not just the classical tropes he played with in the trilogy that established him as a sort of oddball horror auteur, but the ones having to do with the societal and human conflicts closer to the heart of the story—enhance the effectiveness of what his budgetary constraints and what is either a contingent or inherent tendency towards understatement allow him to deliver. Given the topic and given the particular story he tells, the approach works. “Something up here’s off,” LeGros’ Hoffman writes in his diary. “It’s in the numbers but also… you can feel it.”

Fessenden focuses on making it felt. The ominousness gathers to the point where small things arrive with something approaching the assertiveness of a jump scare; a sudden squall of arctic rain, the incongruous pop of a blaze orange rescue sled bouncing behind an outbound snowmobile. The back half of the movie, in which various systems and failsafes and people fail and fail and fail consecutively, takes on an increasingly dreamlike gravity. That’s the scarier part. I don’t imagine it qualifies as much of a spoiler to learn that not everyone makes it out okay.

***

It’s difficult to say that any one idiocy plucked from the roaring confluence of cynicism and obfuscation and plain self-thwarting bad faith that defines the contemporary American conversation over global warming stands out as more idiotic or worse than any other one; every willfully wrong thing is knotted up with and contingent upon a half-dozen others. The situation wasn’t much better in the years when Fessenden began working on The Last Winter, although there is a sense that in this area as elsewhere, something has gone luridly wrong in the last few years.

Where there was once a wary and heavily qualified consensus over global warming supporting the usual circular partisan palaver—something is happening, to be addressed by some kludge-y compromise between people concerned about the problem and other people more concerned about the impact of the solution—there isn’t really, anymore. The word “polarizing” doesn’t seem sufficient in a world whose geographic poles are currently warming twice as fast as the rest of the earth and regularly calving away into the ocean, and anyway the conversation over global warming hasn’t so much polarized as it has metastasized. In the domestic politics of 2017, global warming has become a partisan issue like any other, discussed in increasingly parallel languages that reflect deliriously different engagements with the issue. Where once there were two differently insufficient approaches to the problem to reconcile, we have receded into abstraction—the debate, now, is mostly about each side’s problem with the people on the other.

We would not be here without innumerable tragic and cowardly misapprehensions, but there is one thing that stands out, in The Last Winter and in general. In Hoffman’s increasingly dark and despairing journal, he writes “the biosphere turned, become unfamiliar and erratic. I would say vengeful, but nature is indifferent to us. We fight for our survival, not nature’s.” The character is ranting and increasingly at the end of his tether—he contradicts himself, in the same doomy register, in the very next sentence—but there is something here that Fessenden clearly both understands and wishes to make understood. There is a point at which the question of conservation turns away from nature and towards something more immediately self-interested and urgent. It is disheartening in the extreme that, as we find ourselves in the moment of confronting the existential challenge under the old abstractions, the broader conversation has retreated into know-nothing denial and wimpy-willful sophistry.

It’s a commonplace of discussions on the it-actually-exists-and-is-bad side of the global warming debate to opine that better storytelling is needed. This is the side of the debate on which virtually all of the scientific facts and elite consensus reside, but that consensus routinely expresses itself in the washed-out language of scientists trying to speak English; the facts, factual though they may be, are so crushing in what they promise that they become abstract again. It is natural to turn away from horror at that obliterating scale. It is a difficult story to tell because it is one humans are seemingly built not to understand.

In The Last Winter, Fessenden chose to tell it anyway, and much of what is most powerful and most powerfully unsettling in his movie owes to that. He literalizes where he has to in order to make the story work, and he caricatures where he must to make the points he wants to make; this is his job. But his first decision was his bravest, and it would make The Last Winter stand out even if more—any, really—films had similarly risen to this challenge in the decade since. Plenty of horror filmmakers have wrestled with monsters. Fessenden took on one that he knew he couldn’t beat.

Recently, while flipping through my cable guide, I came across Fatal Instinct, an Armand Assante/Sean Young/Sherilyn Fenn vehicle from 1993—perhaps the last year in which the phrase “an Armand Assante/Sean Young/Sherilyn Fenn vehicle” wouldn’t sound patently absurd. Unable to recall which of the many 1990s erotic thrillers Fatal Instinct actually was, I tuned in, and quickly realized that it’s a Carl Reiner-directed parody of those movies. There’s even a scene where Young’s character flashes her crotch at the hero—just like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct—and he reaches into a drawer in his desk to toss her one of the many pairs of panties that he keeps in a pop-up Kleenex box.

Fatal Instinct came out just a year after Basic Instinct, which shows how quickly and pervasively that film swept through popular culture. But as I watched, I found it hard to tell precisely what Fatal Instinct was spoofing. Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, sure. But the movie also contains references to Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and countless Alfred Hitchcock pictures.

This raised a couple of questions: What were those ‘90s thrillers trying to be in the first place? And why were there so many of them between 1990 and 1995?

Success spawns imitators, and Basic Instinct was a big enough blockbuster to inspire a hundred copycats. But that film was at the crest of the wave, not the start of the swell. There was something going on in the culture at large—and in cinema in particular—that produced a moment where Armand Assante could hand Sean Young fresh underpants and everyone watching would be expected to get the reference.

There were a lot of pathways to that point in pop history. Let’s start in 1985.

Close, Douglas & Eszterhas

Joe Eszterhas shifted from journalism to screenwriting at the end of the 1970s, and spent several years as one of Hollywood’s most-in-demand but least-produced writers. He penned scripts that sold for a lot of money but went unmade; and he padded his income doing uncredited polishes of other people’s work. Then veteran producer Martin Ransohoff came to him with an idea for a classy courtroom drama, akin to Anatomy Of A Murder. Eszterhas took the assignment, and whipped up something far more lurid—and more profitable.

In 1985’s Jagged Edge, Jeff Bridges plays Jack Forrester, a crusading journalist (like Eszterhas!) accused of murdering his wife. He turns to semi-retired criminal lawyer Teddy Barnes (Glenn Close) to defend him. Most of Jagged Edge takes place during the trial, as Teddy goes after the shady prosecutorial tactics of her former boss Thomas Krasny (Peter Coyote), and tries to ignore all the signs that Jack—whom she’s fallen for—is a reckless liar.

Jagged Edge scored good reviews and became a word-of-mouth hit, reaching #1 at the box office in its fourth weekend in theaters. It’s a polished product, with powerhouse performances and an unpredictably twisty plot.

It’s also frequently quite nasty. The initial crime involves a multitude of stab-wounds and the word “BITCH” smeared in blood above the victim. Later we hear about a similar crime perpetrated against a woman who was allowed to live—after the intruder ran a serrated blade roughly against her breasts and nipples.

Jagged Edge’s success meant that Eszterhas had the clout to get a wide variety of his projects made, from tony Costa-Gavras-directed political thrillers like Betrayed and Music Box to wacky comedies like Big Shots and Checking Out. But he didn’t become a household name among movie buffs until he returned to the realm of pervy violence with Basic Instinct, a script he reportedly wrote in two weeks and sold for three million dollars.

The finished film was directed by Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven, whose terrific 1983 suspense picture The Fourth Man had mined similar territory, weaving sexual compulsion with the imminent threat of mutilation. Verhoeven took a script pulled directly from Eszterhas’ arrested adolescent id, and treated it like vintage Hitchcock. Even now, Basic Instinct looks stunning, despite a ridiculous plot where every man’s a roughhousing sex fiend, every woman’s a promiscuously polyamorous femme fatale, and every cooly deadpan line of dialogue maximizes the vulgarity with intent to shock.

Though best known for its “leg uncrossing” interrogation scene (famously parodied in Fatal Instinct!) and for depicting bisexuals and lesbians as both exciting and deadly to be around, Basic Instinct is actually amped-up from start to finish. The sex scenes are remarkably frank, with clear intimations of cunnilingus and screaming orgasms. And inasmuch as the movie has a point, it seems to be that certain kinds of movie characters—like the alcoholic, trigger-happy cop played by Michael Douglas or the sexually rapacious, scandal-ridden crime novelist played by Sharon Stone—exist wholly outside of our conventional middle-class morality. They can shoot who they want, stab who they want, screw who they want.

That perspective is markedly divergent from Fatal Attraction, the 1987 potboiler that paired Douglas and Close, and the film arguably most responsible for launching the ‘90s erotic thriller trend—even if it took a few years before the genre really boomed. Written by James Dearden and directed by Adrian Lyne (the latter of whom also made the sexy 1986 drama 9½ Weeks, and the Eszterhas-penned Flashdance), Fatal Attraction sees Douglas playing well-to-do New York lawyer Dan Gallagher, who has what he believes to be a one-time-only extramarital fling with high-powered publishing house editor Alexandra Forrest, played by Close. Before their weekend together is up, Dan fears that Alex is getting awfully clingy—a suspicion confirmed when she slashes his wrists as he’s trying to leave.

Fatal Attraction takes some silly turns in its third act, with Alex behaving like some kind of supernatural demon—boiling Dan’s daughter’s pet bunny, rising from the dead after being drowned, and so on. It’s a disappointing finish, because for the first hour or so, this is one of the most squirm-inducing of erotic thrillers… because it’s so disturbingly real.

From the opening scenes of Dan muddling through another night in his cluttered apartment—with his demanding young daughter watching inane kiddie TV shows, while his attractive wife is wearing skimpy clothes strictly for housecleaning purposes—Fatal Attraction makes its hero’s choice to spend a weekend having sex with a casual acquaintance perfectly plausible. Alex represents the New York life Dan used to lead (or perhaps has always fantasized about), with salsa dancing and spontaneous blow jobs in the old-fashioned elevator up to her stylish loft apartment.

But while the movie has been criticized for making Alex seem like an unreasonable kook, for most of the movie she comes across as pretty three-dimensional. It’s Dan who makes presumptions about how a man like him is allowed to behave, with no repercussions. When Alex starts calling him at home, Dan’s outraged, saying, “I thought you knew the rules.” When she replies, “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan,” it’s hard not to be on her side. Right up until it lets the audience off the hook by making Alex into a super-villain, Fatal Attraction needles at something deep and painful, reflecting the genuine cultural concerns of a time when ‘70s hedonism and go-go yuppiedom were giving way to politically powerful televangelists and AIDS scares.

Sex, Violence & The Moral Majority

Eszterhas didn’t exactly invent the winning combination of nudity and bloodletting. Eroticism undergirded classic film noir, and shaded most of Hitchcock’s masterpieces. In the 1970s, Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me served as a proto-Fatal Attraction with its story of a one-night stand turning into a dangerous hassle. Over in Italy, the giallo genre produced gorgeous-looking exploitation pictures with titles like Strip Nude For Your Killer. The early 1980s brought a brief wave of neo-noir exemplified by the steamy Body Heat, while Brian De Palma churned out sensational R-rated cinema like Dressed To Kill and Body Double.

And then there were the slasher films. Critics have done some fine work unpacking ‘80s horror, considering everything from the male gaze to the moralism to the stealthy feminist coding. Most of those same critiques and caveats can be applied to the ‘90s erotic thriller. It’s worth noting though how and why movies like Basic Instinct supplanted the likes of Friday The 13th and Halloween.

It’s the rare sociopolitical cause that could unite left-leaning critic Roger Ebert and progressive pastor Jerry Falwell, but the slasher film craze of the mid-‘80s did just that, as concerned folks with influential public platforms began complaining about how their local multiplexes were overrun with stories about masked psychopaths impaling frequently unclad youngsters. The United States never experienced anything like the hysteria in the UK over the “video nasties,” but the gory advertising and pervasive hype for movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night did lead to threats of boycotts, which in turn led to Hollywood lessening the amount of bare flash and open wounds in horror in the back half of the 80s.

The public’s thirst for the prurient never went away though, which is partly why movies like Jagged Edge and Fatal Attraction became so popular. They were by turns sexy and disquieting, yet with a veneer of respectability, conveyed by both their stars and by what appeared to be messages reaffirming “family values.”

In the ‘90s, the erotic thriller essentially cleaved into two sub-genres, represented by Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. The former could best be described as “domestic disturbance” pictures, where someone’s seemingly idyllic family life would be disrupted by the arrival of a seductive babysitter or vengeful nanny. The latter are more sordid tales of sexual obsession, where some horny man or woman gets too turned on by a lover who’s into S&M, voyeurism, or good ol’ fashioned sex-murder.

One of the best films of the era—and ripe for rediscovery—blends the two sub-trends. Screenwriter Don Roos (adapting a John Lutz novel) and director-producer Barbet Schroeder created something archetypal with 1992’s Single White Female, which has Jennifer Jason Leigh playing a lonely, emotionally and mentally unstable young woman who becomes roommates with a recently romantically and professionally jilted New Yorker (Bridget Fonda), and soon begins to meddle in her life, in an effort to be “helpful.”

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Just like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female is often remembered in popular culture for its killer’s worst excesses. When Leigh’s character cuts her hair and changes her clothes to be more like Fonda’s—and later turns violent to protect what she imagines is their tight friendship—that’s a move that still gets referred to “Single White Female-ing.” But also like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female reserves most of its crazy for its final third. Before then, Leigh’s lost soul is just a misfit, looking for ways to connect.

Even Fonda’s Allie Jones is vulnerable in ways that are unusually attuned (for an early ‘90s genre film, that is) to what women endure. She’s naked—but not in a way that invites leers—when she finds out that her boyfriend’s cheating on her. She gets manipulated and sexually harassed by a man she needs as a client for her software business. And Allie seems just as obsessed with her roommate’s background and sexual desires as vice-versa. She even surreptitiously watches her masturbate in one memorable scene.

A lot of the ‘90s erotic thrillers felt like they were trying to impart a tongue-clucking lesson, but what Single White Female means to say is that life can be pretty shitty for a young lady—even for the daughters of Hollywood legends like Vic Morrow and Peter Fonda.

Blockbusters, Beaded Curtains & Stone

The ‘90s erotic thriller didn’t produce a new generation of stars, per se. Glenn Close was done with the genre by the end of the ‘80s, and Michael Douglas only made one more after Basic Instinct: 1994’s Disclosure, a hugely profitable but justly forgotten adaptation of Michael Crichton’s alarmist novel about dubious sexual harassment claims. Mostly, these movies just coopted whomever had Hollywood heat for a few years: Annabella Sciorra, Sean Young, Greta Scacchi, Kim Basinger, Tom Berenger… you name ‘em.

Sharon Stone was an exception. A late blooming star—already 32 when her breakthrough role in 1990’s Total Recall hit theaters—Stone starred in the sensationalistic mid-budget fare Scissors and Where Sleeping Dogs Lie in the year before Basic Instinct changed everything. Looking to capitalize on her newfound notoriety, Stone hopped aboard the next project with an expensive Joe Eszterhas script: the 1993 murder mystery Sliver.

Based on a novel by Ira Levin (author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and A Kiss Before Dying… the latter of which was made into a Sean Young-starring erotic thriller in 1991 by Fatal Attraction screenwriter James Dearden), Sliver has Stone playing Carly Norris, a divorced New York editor who moves into a high-tech skyscraper, and soon finds herself the object of a romantic rivalry between the building’s reclusive genius owner Zeke Hawkins (played by William Baldwin) and blowhard bestselling author Jack Landsford (Tom Berenger).

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Once again, Eszterhas essentially spins a handful of his favorite Penthouse Forum letters into a feature, with a vision of adult sexuality that’s centered on a woman’s pleasure—but only inasmuch as it allows him to show how her orgasmic potential can be unlocked by the right man. Sliver’s big hook is that Zeke has cameras all over the apartment complex, which allows him to watch Carly masturbate, but also to see her gab with her gal-pal about what a good lover he is. With the competent-but-timid Phillip Noyce directing instead of the visionary Verhoeven, Eszterhas’s preposterously purple and twisty script comes off looking a lot goofier.

The last of Eszterhas’ big-money scripts from this era to reach the big screen was 1995’s Jade, directed by the much more talented William Friedkin—who apparently rewrote so much of it that Eszterhas wanted to remove his name from the credits. David Caruso stars a San Francisco DA (so many of these movies are set in either NYC or San Francisco), investigating a high-profile murder case that overlaps with a clandestine kinky-sex ring, involving several powerful people and his best friend’s wife, played by Linda Fiorentino. The director of The French Connection and To Live And Die In L.A. has a good handle on Jade’s action and suspense sequences, which combine Hitchcockian control of the frame with documentary immediacy. But he seems to check out whenever it’s time for another strikingly lit, cartoonishly fantastical sex scene.

There’s a reason why Jade came at the end of the ‘90s erotic thriller craze. The glut of interchangeable studio films like Shattered and Final Analysis—with their overbearing style and nonsensical plot twists—had become fairly exhausting.

Plus, at a certain point, no matter how much money Hollywood pumped into these pictures, they all ended up on video store shelves next to cheapies like Night Eyes… and Night Eyes 2, Night Eyes 3, and Night Eyes 4. (And Body Chemistry, Body Chemistry 2, Body Chemistry 3, and Body Chemistry 4. And Indecent Behavior, Indecent Behavior 2, and Indecent Behavior 3. And Midnight Tease and Midnight Tease 2. And so on.)

A lot of what stoked—and then burned out—the public’s fascination with the erotic thriller was the proliferation of these low-budget, straight-to-video productions, which for the most part were leading the movement, not following. The first installments of Night Eyes and Body Chemistry came out in 1990, and set the standard for what the lower end of the genre would look like, and what it would explore. Shot like TV movies and set mostly in upscale LA neighborhoods and office parks, the films explored the usual themes of voyeurism and the arousing appeal of sexual danger… and frequently featured Andrew Stevens and/or Shannon Tweed.

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They were also a lot less sexy than they promised. Despite box art that emphasized curvy women in lingerie (with the word “unrated” emphasized), movies like Night Eyes and Midnight Tease compartmentalized their scenes of women undressing, and rarely worked sex into the plot as inextricably as Eszterhas did with Basic Instinct, Sliver, and Jade. They seemed to be made primarily for outlets like Blockbuster, which didn’t have a porn section—or for patrons of independent video stores who were too nervous to check out what was in the back room.

Madonnas &… That Other Thing

Here’s the truth of the matter: Though the cheap kicks of nudity and killing were the primary reason ‘90s erotic thrillers existed, very few of the films, on any budgetary level, dealt with sex in an especially sexy way. Compare even the bracingly explicit Basic Instinct with Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill and Body Double. In the latter two, the stories and characters are often every bit as artificial as anything penned by Eszterhas, but from moment to moment the situations feel real, because De Palma is unafraid to excite the emotions.

De Palma’s fine with viewers getting turned on watching Angie Dickinson soap herself up in the shower, or watching Melanie Griffith dance naked in front of a picture window. He can then use those feelings of engagement, curdling them into a sick dread. De Palma has often been accused of misogyny because his movies are so replete with violence against women. He would counter that he’s just using the classic motifs of Hollywood cinema—and that if it makes us uncomfortable, that’s just because he’s really good at it.

By contrast, two of the most popular movies of the early ‘90s, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Poison Ivy (both released in 1992), just fumblingly push the buttons of disgust and catharsis. Unlike Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female, or even Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, the murderers played by Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Drew Barrymore in Poison Ivy are hyperbolically batty. Both films mean to suggest that the stable suburban family unit is so fragile that it can be unravelled by one diabolical female, but the villains are so outlandishly cruel that they can’t support any reading that reflects real world problems. These two movies literalize the most savage impressions some viewers had of Fatal Attraction’s Alex.

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These kinds of misfires were common. That’s why the genre’s quintessential film is also one of the worst: Body Of Evidence, a 1993 mash-up of Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct, which arrived at the peak of its star Madonna’s “provocative sexpot” persona. Channeling Sharon Stone—but with none of the layers beneath the flirtatious smirk—Madonna plays an S&M aficionado whose lovers have the bad habit of dying in bed. Willem Dafoe plays her lawyer, who gets drawn into a sexual relationship with his client, and gets off on the pain she inflicts.

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The story makes very little sense, director Uli Edel overdoes the extreme camera angles and noir shadows, and for a movie in which the two stars simulate very specific sexual activity—with no bedspreads or hazy camera filters to disguise just what’s being thrust into where—the eroticism’s more laughable than alluring. Body Of Evidence was the perfect star vehicle for Madonna, an artist who’s frequently put “sex” in quotation marks. Unintentionally, she turns the movie into a mockery of the forced kink and slapdash storytelling of the genre’s most popular products.

Looking back, a lot of these movies seem like sideways attempts to make neo-noir, softcore porn, or slasher pictures, via the kinds of premises that were selling at the time. The best films kept the obligatory elements sequestered in the final reel or two, so that they could deliver richer explorations of sexuality, gender roles, and contemporary alienation. The worst just offered cynical stimulation, devoid of any real conviction. The dirty secret of the ‘90s erotic thriller was that the line between a Body Of Evidence and a Fatal Instinct was always razor thin—and plainly exposed.

“There’s a body on the railing
That I can’t identify
And I’d like to reassure you
But I’m not that kind of guy.”
—Robyn Hitchcock, “Raymond Chandler Evening,” 1986.

At the conclusion of John Huston’s 1941 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) turns the woman he has come to love (Mary Astor) over to the police for murdering his partner. She refuses to believe he’ll betray her, asking, “How can you do this to me, Sam?” He responds:  

You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once and give it up… When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens we’re in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere… I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over, but that’ll pass… I won’t [let you go] because all of me wants to, regardless of consequences.

Spade is giving voice to the ethos of the hardboiled detective, the uncorrupted man who patrols the margins of a fallen world. The genre, which Hammett and Raymond Chandler helped found, would prove to be enduringly popular. They transformed the effete sleuths of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers’ drawing rooms into the tough shamuses of the alleyways. The crimes their characters investigated were not unrealistic locked-room murders but the basic, impulsive cruelties that human beings commit out of greed, anger, and corruption. In other words, they embraced realism in all its uncompromising sordidness. As Chandler, whose own signature detective Philip Marlowe would be embodied by Bogart in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946), wrote in his 1950 exegesis of the detective story, “The Simple Art of Murder,”

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.

It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

The problem is that the definition of realism—and sordidness—is always changing as we uncover new layers of perversity. Chandler wrote that the successful detective story did not merely surrender to reality:

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption… Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

Within a quarter of a century of Chandler writing these words, this great cynic would seem naïve. It wasn’t his concept of the detective that dated, but the idea that the man of honor could defeat evil, or even contain it. 

From the time of The Big Sleep, in which Marlowe not only solves the crime (mostly; neither Chandler nor the filmmakers knew who committed one of the murders) but gets the girl to the revision of the genre that came with The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), and Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975), a great deal had changed. The American Century that had supposedly begun with the successful prosecution of the Second World War and the United States’ monopoly on the atomic bomb had quickly unraveled. It is difficult to overstate the nation’s confidence in the immediate postwar period, with the economy surging, the Baby Boom bringing a burst of youth and optimism, and pristine towns and cities when a good chunk of the world had been bombed into rubble. During a September 1945 conference with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov protested his opposite number’s inflexibility saying the American negotiated as if he had, “an atomic bomb in his side pocket.” Byrnes replied that that was indeed the case, and, “If you don’t cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.”

By 1949, the Russians had the bomb, and the difficulties mounted with accelerating speed as the 1950s and ‘60s passed. By the 1970s, every confidence had been eroded. As the ‘60s closed, the most shattering items were the ongoing Vietnam War and the Kennedy and King assassinations, but the first years of the new decade offered little respite. In the years immediately preceding and including the release of the aforementioned trio of films, the national mood was tobogganing into the abyss. The war continued, joined by Watergate, the greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Mixed in were the Kent State massacre; the Attica uprising and resultant slaughter; the trials of Lt. William Calley and Charles Manson; the Boston bussing riots; serial bombings by the Weathermen and other domestic terrorists; the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the government’s ongoing deceptions regarding the war; the revelation that the FBI and CIA had engaged in illegal surveillance of American citizens; the first OPEC oil embargo, producing shortages and long lines at gas stations; and runaway inflation and unemployment. Also, the Beatles broke up, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison died, and disco rose to the top of the charts. This list is by no means inclusive of the misery that kicked off the Have a Nice Day! decade. In 1972, when the radical professor Angela Davis was acquitted of murdering a judge, she was asked if she felt she had received a fair trial. “The very fact of an acquittal,” she said, meant, “there had been no fair trail, because a fair trial would have been no trial at all.”

That was the 1970s: It would have been fairer to have skipped the whole thing.  

Given the mood, it’s unsurprising that a certain atmosphere started to manifest itself at the movies. There was a great deal of nostalgia, whether for the 1930s, such as with Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973), The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), Dillinger (John Milius, 1973), and Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974), or the more innocent phase of the 1960s, as with American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973). Simultaneously, there was the rise of the “paranoid thriller” with films like Executive Action (David Miller, 1973), The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), and Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975). 

A handful of films tried to straddle the difference, creating the paranoid nostalgic detective film, and it is to this peculiar genre that The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, and Night Moves belong. They subvert Chandler’s prerequisite for a successful story. These deeply cynical films say there is no possibility of redemption, the man who is neither mean nor afraid is a fool and honor has no value. The famous last line of Polanski’s film (the ending he insisted upon over screenwriter Robert Towne’s ending, the ending of a Holocaust survivor), spoken to the hero after his journey of 130 minutes has ended in tragedy and disillusionment, is, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Chinatown here stands in for an open-ended list of other places. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Los Angeles” or “Forget it, Jake. It’s everywhere.”

At first, the movie-going public wasn’t quite ready to reconsider whether the mean streets might triumph over the man of honor. The Long Goodbye, an adaptation of Chandler’s novel of the same name, was initially to be filmed by Peter Bogdanovich, who envisioned Marlowe portrayed by Lee Marvin or Robert Mitchum—in other words, a traditional take. Altman preferred his MASH star Elliott Gould. He and scriptwriter Leigh Brackett, who had been one of the writers (along with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman) of Hawks’ Big Sleep, conceived of Marlowe as an anachronism, a Rip Van Winkle awakening into ‘70s Los Angeles. The offbeat casting of Gould added to the viewer’s sense of dislocation. As Gould later told Mitchell Zuckoff for his biography of Altman, “I love Robert Mitchum and I love Lee Marvin, and I couldn’t argue with them. But you’ve seen them and you haven’t seen me.”

Indeed, Gould’s Marlowe had never been seen before, but only because the character had never been placed in such high contrast to his surroundings. This Marlowe is as insouciant as Bogart’s, although his quips aren’t nearly as polished, but unlike Bogart’s version thinks he’s still the first-person narrator in Chandler’s novel; whenever Gould doesn’t have another character to talk to, he talks to himself. Sometimes even when he does have another character to talk to he talks to himself. The effect is not unlike that of the original Fleischer Popeye cartoon series, where William Costello’s mumbling vocalizations comprise a stream of consciousness that doesn’t necessarily match the action on the screen. 

In a story only loosely based on Chandler’s novel and set in the then-present day, Marlowe is confronted by three concurrent mysteries. His friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton, the erstwhile 21-game winner for the 1963 New York Yankees) has supposedly murdered his wife and committed suicide after absconding to Mexico. Marlowe doesn’t believe he was the murderer. Simultaneously, he is engaged by Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt) to find her missing husband, the eccentric, alcoholic novelist Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden, going big). Finally, brutal mobster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) thinks Marlowe knows the location of the $350,000 of his money Lennox was carrying and demands he return it or face a fatal reprisal.

Looming over all of the above is the problem of Marlowe’s cat, who has absconded after Marlowe is unable to furnish his or her preferred brand of canned food. As the mysteries unfold, overlap, and cohere (at least to an extent), Marlowe finds that even his ostensible friends can’t be trusted, not even the cat, and that rather than being the investigator, the protagonist, of these mysteries, he is merely a puppet on someone else’s string.  

Neither Gould nor Altman play Marlowe for comedy, but let the film’s settings and situations emphasize the absurdity of the character’s conception; a detective who dealt in the dirty business of the underworld but remained above it would have to be so out of synch with the world around him that his level of detachment would border on the surreal. Finally, the film forces Marlowe to recognize the impossibility of his position and he rejects the limits his creator placed on him. This leads to a jarring final note, especially for devotees of the character, while opening the door to a world in which detective fiction can serve not only as escapism but can cope with the world as we experience it.

Having taken these liberties, The Long Goodbye deeply offended some viewers, who were wedded to Marlowe as Chandler had written him. Time called it “a travesty” of “Chandler’s superb novel about honor and friendship, two subjects among a great many that Robert Altman cannot bring himself to take seriously… It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire.” Charles Champlin, in a Los Angeles Times review titled, “A Private Eye’s Honor Blackened,” wrote that the film’s Marlowe, “is an untidy dimwit who could not locate a missing skyscraper and who would be refused service at a hot dog stand. He is not Chandler’s Marlowe or mine… Brackett and Altman… deny almost everything that was honorable about Marlowe.”

Champlin continued, “Altman may be suggesting that the realities about private eyes and their world are more sordid and scruffy than Chandler cared to admit. Maybe… but without any real conflict between good and evil, no urgent presumptions that right and wrong exist,” all that is left, “is a cynical insistence that nothing has value.” In other words, black and white moralism dies hard; the critic saw the point, but rejected it.

Audiences rejected it, too, in part because United Artists didn’t know how to market the film. Originally advertised as a straight Chandler adaptation along the Bogart lines, the film was withdrawn and reissued with a new campaign featuring art by Mad caricaturist Jack Davis, suggesting it was a broad comedy. Both campaigns were dramatically misleading and it took the passage of years and critical reassessment for the film to gain anything like appreciation.

It seems doubtful that Goodbye softened up audiences for another crack at the same material, but when Chinatown came along 15 months later the reception was more welcoming despite the film’s subject matter being far darker. Goodbye tanked at the box office and received no major awards; Chinatown was number one at the box office for five weeks and received 11 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won a Best Original Screenplay statuette for Robert Towne.

Towne’s detective, J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is native to the film rather than a Hammett or Chandler creation, but he’s in the same ballpark, a former police investigator now in private practice; though his firm is in the uncomfortable business of revealing marital infidelity, Gittes is defiantly insistent that he makes “an honest living.” Unlike The Long Goodbye, Chinatown is a period piece, set in 1937 Los Angeles. Still, just as Altman signaled his Chandler was well out of Production Code country by making early and frequent recourse to Marlowe’s neighbors, a colony of young women who seemingly practice nude yoga on their balcony 24 hours a day, Polanski fades in on photos of the wife of one of Gittes’ clients caught in the act of extramarital copulation.

In a plot that would have been impossible for Bogart to tackle under the restrictions of his day (The Big Sleep, for example, cannot fully admit that the blackmail case that sets the story in motion involves pornography), a woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray hires Gittes to investigate her husband Hollis, the head of the city Department of Water and Power. After learning that Hollis is refusing to build a new dam, fearing a repeat of a previous dam failure that resulted in many fatalities, he photographs him in an embrace with a young woman who he assumes to be the man’s mistress. When the pictures are published, he is confronted by a second woman (Faye Dunaway) who he has never seen before. She reveals herself to be the actual Mrs. Mulwray. Gittes has been set up, a problem that gains further urgency when Hollis is found dead, apparently having drowned in one of his own reservoirs. Investigating Hollis further, Gittes learns that he was once partners with his wife’s estranged father, Noah Cross (John Huston, the director of TheMaltese Falcon, and excellent). The two virtually created Los Angeles  by transferring water from rural agricultural areas to the city, whose growth would otherwise have been limited by its arid environment, then had a falling out.

From this beginning, Gittes uncovers a level of corruption so deep and cancerous that he can barely comprehend its dimensions. Asked at one point if someone is honest, he remarks that he is, to a point: “He has to swim in the same water we all do.” As it turns out, the water is, literally and figuratively, more compromised than Gittes realized. When Bogart turns Mary Astor over to the police at the end of Falcon, he wears a look of deep disgust but recovers rapidly enough to deliver the film’s famous line observing that the titular sculpture “is the stuff that dreams are made of.” At the conclusion of Chinatown, Nicholson is overcome by a revulsion so deep that he is shocked into a childlike state and must be led away by the hand. He gets no last line, though he tries to articulate one and fails.

Late in the film, Gittes asks Cross to explain his rationale for an elaborate money-making scheme. “Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” Cross answers, “The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!” This is simultaneously a non-sequitur and an honest answer. Cancer doesn’t know why it must devour healthy tissue, it just does, and its mindless determination makes it incredibly hard to check. Gittes, Marlowe’s man of honor, finds he is not up to the task. A code will not stop cancer, only excision, if excision is even possible. Gittes isn’t as glaringly out of place as Gould’s Marlowe because he’s a 1930s character in a 1930s setting, but he’s no less of an anachronism. Midway through the film, he tells Evelyn that he left policework because of a mistake: “I was trying to keep someone from being hurt. I ended up making sure that she was hurt.” This is a rejection of Chandler’s “quality of redemption.” Gittes is not destined to make up for his mistake, but to repeat it. Were the film as true to its origins as critics demanded Altman’s film be, it would never have been capable of that degree of nihilism.

Night Moves attracts neither the critical scrutiny The Long Goodbye receives for being part of Altman’s catalogue nor the adulation that greeted Chinatown from the moment of its debut, though it did have an important director in Arthur Penn, who had helped usher movies into a new age of maturity with Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Whereas that film broke new ground, Night Moves explores territory already explored by Brackett, Altman, Towne, and Polanski, but with perhaps even greater nihilism. Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a former NFL star now working as a private detective. His wife Ellen (Susan Clark), a dealer in Mexican antiquities, is unfaithful but would be willing to abandon the affair if Harry would stop pursuing small-time cases of marital infidelity and join the large private investigations company run by their friend, Nick (Kenny Mars), another Mexican art aficionado. This impasse is interrupted when former movie starlet Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) hires Moseby to find her missing teenage daughter, Delly (Melanie Griffith in her first credited role).

Delly has fallen in with her stepfather Tom (John Iverson), a movie stuntman, and has followed him to the Florida Keys. Moseby tracks them there and learns that Tom is using his experience flying small planes in the movies to indulge in some kind of smuggling operation in the Gulf and that he and Delly are sleeping together. Tom begs Moseby to take her back to California. “I want that kid the hell out of here. You see, I… I get pretty foolish with her, and… Well, you’ve seen her. God, there ought to be a law!”

“There is,” Harry replies. This exchange encapsulates the critique of 1970s society inherent in all three films. There is a law, but a law that no longer acts as a restraint on anyone’s behavior might as well not exist.

As with Marlowe and Gittes, Moseby gets a good way towards unraveling the conspiracy at the heart of the story, but achieving justice proves to be a much different matter. Not only is a key thread of the smuggling operation left untouched and at least one murderer left unpunished, but Moseby is unable to prevent additional killings. In an ambiguous ending which borders dangerously close to incoherence, Moseby is left alone in open waters, wounded and bleeding, on a boat that is steaming in circles. He is in nearly full knowledge of the crimes he intended to uncover (the ubiquity of Mexican artifacts suggest that Harry’s world is more compromised than even he realizes, but the film doesn’t even gesture towards concluding this aspect of the story), but whether he will psychically or even physically survive to act on that knowledge is uncertain as the picture fades to black.

All three films use foreshadowing to telegraph that their resolutions will not satisfy in the traditional sense. The Long Goodbye features a security guard who likes to do impressions as a recurring character. Early in the film, he asks Bouton if he can do his Barbara Stanwyck and launches into what seems to be a line from Double Indemnity (a film written by Chandler): “I don’t understand. I don’t understand it at all. I’ve never understood it, Walter. I just don’t understand why I don’t understand it all.” Bouton responds, “Okay, just remember that and you’ll be all right.” In Chinatown, Huston’s Noah Cross states the idea directly to Gittes when they first meet: “You may think you know what you’re dealing with,” he says, “but believe me, you don’t.” Night Moves’ title is a play on knight moves; when Moseby is on a stakeout, he works on chess problems, a habit borrowed from the Marlowe of Chandler’s novels. Demonstrating a famous closing, he says the loser of the match could have escaped the trap if he had made a different move with his knight, “but he didn’t see it. He played something else and lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I know I would have.”

Moseby is the knight in question here, simultaneously both player and piece. Marlowe and Gittes are also knights of a kind. All think they are sophisticates who have seen everything that’s dirty in the world, but are quickly revealed to be far out of their depths, with their sense of fair play weighing them down and blinding them to the pervasive danger around them. All three men are affable, particularly Moseby, and that quality too proves to be a weakness.

Early in Night Moves, Moseby’s wife comes upon him watching a football game and asks him who is winning. “Nobody,” he says. “One side is just losing slower than the other.” This is yet another crystallization of the mood of the times. No one wins a Vietnam War or a Watergate, not really, and from Calley to Nixon the guilty aren’t punished.  In his 1975 song ”Hurricane,” about  the murder conviction of boxer Rubin Carter, Bob Dylan sang he was, “ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.” It was the tenor of the times.

This sense of preordained disappointment proved so hard to shake that though neo-noir films continue to be made, aside from a few passing attempts (an aging Robert Mitchum ultimately got a couple of cracks at playing Marlowe) the unstained protector on the soiled streets has never recovered the standing he had before these films. Films made with the Hammett-Chandler model in mind are more likely to subject the idea to mockery, as the Coen Brothers did with The Big Lebowski (1998). The Dude is Marlowe, just more inept than Gittes, more dissipated than Gould. 

It’s a sad thing when a kind of American original falls into such disrepute that the only thing to do is laugh at it. Perhaps we have grown too cynical, but it is also fair to say that we have matured to the point that we no longer believe people to be incorruptible. This is a sad but necessary passage into adulthood and these three films abetted that awakening. It remains for us to find a new standard of heroism with which to replace Marlowe and his ilk.  

It’s a common stereotype that men are known to be the more aggressive and competitive of the sexes, and that women are far coyer and subtler at the game. Studies have shown that women enjoy cooperation as much as competition, that they find symbiosis in their struggle for dominance. And it’s this complicated, nuanced relationship among women that has often been mined for great psychological cinema. Male friendships inspire buddy comedies and male competitiveness often manifests on the screen in a more literal way, such as through a sporting event, but with women, their bonding is often explored like a fever dream—as a merging of two identities, or one identity diverging into two. It makes for far more fascinating storytelling, but the end result is more often than not skewed towards the tragic.

The examples are plenty. One of the earliest standouts is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), in which Kim Novak’s tragic heroine personas Madeleine and Judy send Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson into a hypnotic spiral. In Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), roommates and coworkers Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) swap dynamics, and thus dominance, after a climactic incident until they arrive at a new, strange means of co-existence. In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), the merging of identities between the inexplicably mute actress Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) is illustrated quite literally, with two halves of their faces joined together to form one. It’s nearly impossible to tell whose face is whose at this point, and what scenes are to be taken literally. Then the film burns. These movies can’t help but offer dual realities, too. In Persona and 3 Women, especially, dream sequences blur with real life, and they don’t exactly ask to be distinguished. (For Altman, the idea for the film came to him through a dream.) These movies almost seem to depict dark magic but they aren’t necessarily fantasy films.

The Guardian’s Steve Rose referred to these as “frenemyship movies” while critic Miriam Bale coined the term “persona swap films.” Bale writes in Joan’s Digest:

“These films […] are about the friendship between two people, usually women (often a brunette and blonde, and frequently one eccentric/dominant and the other more conventional) who swap personas. It is usually a story about two women, yet is differentiated in tone and logic from something like Thelma and Louise. That film is deliberately a buddy action flick starring two women; there is no swap of supple personality types and there is no magical merge. The films that belong in this subgenre have a recognizable, nonrealist tone, a dream logic. They’re psychological, supernatural and, at their best, illuminate very specific aspects of relationships between women.”

This theme of female identities—and the swapping, merging, and diverging of them—has been a prevailing theme in women-centric thrillers and dramas alike. Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 erotic thriller Single White Female used a makeover plot point for the identity swap moment, with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character Hedy getting the same bob and dye job as her aspirational roommate Allie (Bridget Fonda). The film’s title has even become part of our vernacular—when you hear that so-and-so is “single white female-ing” someone, you know exactly what that means. Brian De Palma has dedicated a chunk of his filmography to this subject (see: 1973’s Sisters, 1976’s Obsession, 1984’s Body Double, 2002’s Femme Fatale) as did David Lynch (see: 1997’s Lost Highway, 2001’s Mulholland Dr., 2006’s Inland Empire, and both runs of Twin Peaks). Darren Aronofsky brought the theme to the already cutthroat world of ballet with 2010’s Black Swan—a dynamic that not only emerges between the two leads, Nina (Natalie Portman) and Odile (Mila Kunis), but also between Nina and the principal dancer past her prime, Beth (Winona Ryder), who is being replaced. (Beth is also credited as “The Dying Swan.”) More recently, there’s been Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth (2015), about a diverging friendship that funnels its pent-up frustrations into Repulsion-esque mania, and Olivier Assayas’ The Clouds of Sils Maria (2015), with a subtler version of the Black Swan theme of an older woman being replaced by a younger protégée, both in life and the performance within the performance.

But all these movies have another thing in common: They were all directed by men. Perhaps it’s the notion that women use indirect aggression for romantic attention, that have caused curious frenzy in the minds of male filmmakers, but they continue to create and portray female characters who fall under this umbrella of twisted fate (one woman usually dominates or kills or attempts to kill the other, or they both get in trouble). It must be a frightening concept to men—this idea of women having a special bond, of women containing multitudes—and perhaps that’s why many of these movies carry a tragic tone. In a way, these films could be love letters to women, too. Men, spellbound by the secrets shared between women, can’t help but let their minds wander to the mysteries of their link—and while trying to chip away at it, they end up destroying it in their art.

Only very few women directors have depicted that kind of relationship between two women in such a tragic manner (see Josephine Decker’s 2013 film Butter on the Latch and Sophia Takal’s 2016 film Always Shine, which was an Oscilloscope release). Also rare are male persona swap movies; in Joan’s Digest, Bale gives Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970) as an example of such, but adds that “for men to enact the motions of this Persona Swap, they must first be feminized.” In Roeg’s film, they don make-up and a wig.

With the exception of Decker and Takal, women are usually less lethal in their portrayal of female friendships that deal with this persona swap. In research for this piece, I collected a large list of films about women and identity and noticed that as opposed to men, women directors were more inclined to make feel-good films about the joys of friendship, or some sort of comedy of misunderstandings. Examples include Vera Chytilova’s Daisies (1966), Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Nancy Meyers’ The Parent Trap (1998), and Melanie Mayron’s TV movie version of Freaky Friday (1995). Two women who start acting like and becoming each other doesn’t have to be something tragic; it’s reminiscent of the dynamic between best friends. Daisies came out the same year as Persona and while it also plays out like a fever dream, too, with two women who seemingly become one, Bergman’s film is a frightening devouring of each other’s autonomies while Chytilova’s is a delightful us-against-the-world type romp. Women aren’t afraid of these close relationships between themselves; they feel stronger in union, life is more fun when together.

There’s truth to both ends of the spectrum, though. (Women, they sure contain multitudes). I’m not here to discredit the films made by men—some even have creative input from its leading actresses. Sure, there’s an inimitable euphoria of watching Daisies with your best girl friend, but ask any woman and they’ll likely find the motif of Persona or 3 Women or Single White Female familiar, too. Bale notes that “one or several of these films is on the list of the favorite films of virtually every woman director or film critic I know,” and that’s certainly true for myself. Takal’s and Decker’s films are especially fascinating because the female perspective is, to some degree, lived (even if Takal’s husband Lawrence Michael Levine wrote the screenplay for Always Shine). Good news is, this subgenre is endlessly fascinating and isn’t going away anytime soon—what I hope to see is more portrayal of women’s relationships on all ends of the spectrum, especially from more female creators.

There’s a concept in video game theory called “ludonarrative dissonance.” At its core, it’s about the interaction between a game’s themes (what it wants you to feel) and its mechanics (what it wants you to do), as well as any conflicts that might result when those two things intersect. An example of this would be a game that promotes themes of individuality and freedom while locking the player into a single, uncontrollable plot-line that doesn’t let them choose how the story will unfold. Or, say, a war-themed, combat-heavy game that purports to discuss the value of life while simultaneously tasking you with slaughtering hundreds of digital representatives of a foreign enemy.

The concept isn’t a law or anything, and millennia of tabletop games have proven that superficially contradictory ideas like competition and collegiality can peacefully co-exist, but it’s a helpful way to get the ball rolling when thinking about games as discrete pieces of entertainment media. What’s the goal of the game? What do you have to do when you’re playing it? On a broader level, how does it make you feel? Why do you keep playing it?

And, for the purposes of today’s discussion: Why do so many people keep trying to make movies out of video games, despite decades of evidence that this is a very, very bad idea?

***

Many movies—maybe even most of them—aren’t original. They’re adapted from other media. Books, stage plays, short stories, magazine articles, songs, older movies, foreign movies, television shows, you name it: Hollywood does not care. If you think the idea will sell tickets, then provenance is not an issue. Of the most popular American movies ever made (adjusted for inflation), seven of the top ten, and 15 of the top 20, are based on stories that started somewhere else.

It makes sense, then, that Hollywood would want to mine video games for film ideas. It’s easy now to forget that video games were initially dismissed as a fad, and that the industry was almost wiped out in a crash in 1983. By 1990, though, just five years after the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in North America, 30% of U.S. households had an NES; by comparison, all home computers combined had only penetrated 23% of the market by then. It’s been pretty much non-stop ever since. In 2016, while the North American box office grossed $11.3 billion, the U.S. video game industry brought in $30.4 billion. You’d have to be crazy to not want a piece of that.

As a result, since the early 1990s, movies based on games have shown up every year or two. Early adaptations were based on games that had achieved almost total pop-cultural saturation—Super Mario Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), Mortal Kombat (1995)—while more recent entries have been inspired by titles that some viewers might not even recognize as games, like 2014’s Need for Speed or 2016’s Assassin’s Creed. Yet despite that variance, pretty much all movies based on games generate the same reaction: audiences ignore them, critics don’t like them, and studios almost always lose money. For every little windfall, like Mortal Kombatgrossing $70 million domestically (and another $51 million overseas) on a $20 million budget, there are at least a dozen adaptations that struggle to make their money back, either barely breaking even or flat-out failing.

This is where the dissonance comes into play: a tension between what the industry wants (money) and how it acts (makes movies that don’t earn money). A conflict between how something can succeed in one medium (games) while dying in another (film). A tantalizing but apparently unsolvable proposition to turn one kind of visual entertainment into another. People do it all the time with books, or stories, or really anything they can get their hands on. Why should games be any different—and harder?

There are three reasons, and they’re all about the same thing: us.

***

Start with the written word. A novel (or short story, or novella; you get the idea) is rooted in psychology. The reader is taken as deep into the characters’ conscious and subconscious feelings as the author wants to take them. Thousands upon thousands of words in a given book don’t have anything to do with “what’s happening,” but are instead just about the emotions, history, and family drama that got us to this point. That psychology then flows outward to trigger action.

Movies, which survive on action, need that psychological background to explain character motivation, so a good adaptation of a book will find a way to condense and explain that psychology through images, acts, and dialogue. Their formats are different, but their goals are the same: to start from a place of character and build outward to see how that character confronts the world.

(Even here, things start to get potentially dicey. In a book, it feels totally natural to move from inner monologue to dialogue to physical action in the space of a paragraph, but because a film needs an image or sound to communicate, the poetic emotional reflections of a novel are often turned into clumsy exposition for the screen. When we talk about a book as “unfilmable,” we’re saying that it relies so much on the invisible emotional connections created by its authors psychological exploration of the characters that there’s no easy to way to transform those moments into concrete, physical actions in the real world.)

Games, though, start with action. As the player, you are immediately in control. Super Mario Bros. doesn’t explain a single thing; it just shoves you into the game world and lets you figure out what’s happening. Even modern games like Grand Theft Auto V, which are built on complicated narrative systems of nested choices that the player can make over the course of dozens of hours, only give you a few seconds of animated storytelling before handing over the reigns. Information about the story is parceled out over time, but it’s done in tandem with action that you are asked to execute. In short: there’s a lot less build-up. There’s nowhere to go because you’re already there, experiencing and creating the action. A film’s story is designed to pull you along and explain the motivations of its characters in a way that you can understand, but a game wants you to insert yourself into the story and determine your own justifications for its existence.

Those are two separate and equally valid ways to make and consume entertainment, but they don’t cross-pollinate. A movie based on a game has to invent all manner of backstory and motivations, so much so that you wind up with something so fundamentally different from the source material that it’s hard to remember why you made it in the first place. (Again, I presentSuper Mario Bros.) The use and structure of a game’s narrative is worlds apart from a book, or a movie. There’s no overlap, and forcing one just makes things worse.

***

Crucially, too, movies based on games misunderstand one of the key appeals of the medium: the ability to interact with and manipulate the environment. As the player, you decide how to move through the game’s world. Do you want to spend an hour just walking from one end of the map to the other? Knock yourself out.

That interactive, three-dimensional space becomes something you can mentally reference throughout the game, and even recall after you’re done playing. The spatial reasoning you’re doing while playing games doesn’t just improve your cognition or memory, but actually renders for you a space that you can revisit in your mind’s eye.

Here’s an experiment: Think about your childhood home, or your first office job, or the street where you live. Close your eyes and picture that place. Now imagine your perspective moving through that space, turning from side to side, taking in everything. Even though that place exists in the real world, and a game’s digital environment doesn’t, there’s no difference between the experience of visualizing your navigation through them.

You can probably see the problem here. Movies, for all their spectacle, are flat. You see only and always what the frame is showing you. You have to make sense of the film’s world by processing the shots and building your own mental map, only without the benefit of being able to do so at your own pace. This is why good directing, especially in action films, does everything it can to create a clear, understandable geography of the scene. If you know where the characters are in relation to each other, you’ll be able to follow the story. But if you can’t make sense of it, it will all start to blur together. Films and games are both visual media, but their presentation of those visuals, and the ways you can interact with them, are so completely separate that they’re almost using different languages. A game’s three-dimensional space is rendered flat on-screen, turning from something special into something predictable.

For instance, the open-world adventure games in the Assassin’s Creed series are all built around the idea of giving the player as much control as possible to achieve an objective. You can run up walls, leap from roof to roof, hide in crowds, send others to do your dirty work, and more. The concepts that drove the games proved so popular that they showed up in others, and “playing an Assassin’s Creed game” now means something very specific, mechanically and structurally. The 2016 film version, though, was a lifeless dud that didn’t fare well with critics or audiences and that squandered the reunion of Macbeth star Michael Fassbender and director Justin Kurzel. It was a generic blockbuster designed to look like everything else at the multiplex. There’s no sense of purpose, wonder, or power in the final product. It doesn’t—can’t—have anything that made the source special, and it doesn’t do anything to stand out in its new medium, either. It doesn’t belong anywhere.

***

Maybe the biggest obstacle, though, is the dissonance at the center of it all: Games are about control. Movies are about surrender.

In games, you hold the controller (or sit at the keyboard) and dictate the action. You navigate the space. You make the decisions that trigger the events that lead to winning or losing. It’s a personal experience built on direct engagement with the medium. If you stop playing, the game doesn’t continue. It can’t. At the movies (or at home), you sit back, focused on the screen. You don’t control the speed of the story, or the plot decisions, or who says what. You are watching the movie to be told a story, to be wrapped up in a narrative controlled by someone else. Your engagement is based on attention, not decision-making.

There are even different degrees of involvement you can have with them, as anyone who’s ever idly checked Facebook on their phone while “watching a movie” can tell you. Some games aim for a different kind of engagement, though, built solely on repetitive feedback loops instead of complicated or lengthy narratives. When it debuted on smartphones at the end of 2009, Angry Birds was an instant success because it was a focused, incredibly compelling game experience that was ideal for killing time. The Angry Birds Movie, though, released in 2016, was a generic cartoon that was only made as a way to capitalize on the existing brand recognition of the mobile game series. The movie misunderstood what we liked about the game in the first place. We didn’t want a story. We just wanted something fun to do for a few minutes.

Ultimately, we want different things from each medium. The only similarity between the two is that they’re leisure experiences, but the fact that they’re both so often presented on home TV screens has persuaded many stubborn writers, producers, and directors over the years that they’re related. It’s not that one is inherently better or worse than the other; it’s that they occupy different spheres. We go to them for different reasons and different experiences. We don’t like movies based on games because, deep down, they don’t even feel like movies. They’re ungainly, bastardized things that try to please two masters and only disappoint them. Even the words that define the audiences bear this out: you can be a player or a viewer, but not both.

Over the course of their three-decade career, Joel and Ethan Coen have buried a man alive, fed a body into a woodchipper, and shot a grinning Brad Pitt in the face at point-blank range. The most vicious act in their oeuvre, though, involves no physical violence whatsoever. It’s the blunt verdict issued by a famous French piano teacher, Jacques Carcanogues (Adam Alexi-Malle), after hearing a teenage girl’s audition. “Did she make mistakes?” asks the girl’s patron, who considers her a prodigy. “Mistake? No,” Carcanogues replies. “It say E flat, she play E flat. Bing, bing. She play the right note—always.” Nonetheless, he refuses to accept her as a pupil, insisting that her playing, while technically impressive, is emotionally sterile. “The music, monsieur, she come from l'intérieur. From inside. The music, she start here,” he explains, gesturing to his heart. Perhaps she might make a good typist, he suggests. “I cannot teach her to have the soul.”

This exchange occurs late in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Coens’ black-and-white film noir riff about a taciturn barber, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), whose spontaneous decision to invest in a dry-cleaning business (without having the necessary funds) leads to tragedy. At the time of the film’s release, in 2001, Carcanogues’ words pointedly echoed the most common criticism of the Coen brothers: that their films are superficially clever but fundamentally empty, little more than self-conscious genre riffs. That complaint doesn’t get lodged as frequently these days, in part because Joel and Ethan finally made an overtly personal movie, 2009’s A Serious Man, that reflects their own suburban Jewish upbringing. But The Man Who Wasn’t There remains their most wrenching cri de coeur, even if its heartfelt aspects are deliberately buried deep.

The film’s very first line, spoken by Ed in voiceover narration, insists that appearances don’t tell the whole story: “Yeah, I worked in a barber shop, but I never considered myself a barber.” Ed wants us to look past the surface—which is crucial, because the surface, when it comes to Ed, could hardly be more phlegmatic. Early on, he introduces us to his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), and casually reveals that she’s having an affair with “Big Dave” Brewster (James Gandolfini), her boss at the department store where she works. Given the movie’s noir trappings, one might assume a crime of passion to be forthcoming…but Ed seems untroubled by the knowledge that Doris is stepping out on him, shrugging it off with the words “It’s a free country.” Nor does Ed and Doris’ marriage appear to be an especially happy one. They barely talk to each other—indeed, Ed barely talks at all, except in voiceover—and the relationship seems grounded in mutual tolerance. When Ed anonymously blackmails Big Dave about the affair, he explains the scheme strictly as an effort to get enough money to go into the dry-cleaning business. Passion doesn’t enter into it at all.

Or so the Jacques Carcanogues of the world would have you believe. But while Ed never comes out and states his feelings for Doris—that’s not his style—The Man Who Wasn’t There functions almost entirely as a stealth declaration of his love for her. It’s a film in which the motor driving every action purrs so softly that it’s barely audible. Stoicism, the Coens argue, isn’t necessarily the same thing as indifference, and things that look shallow (or frivolous, in the case of their work) may intentionally conceal hidden depths.

Clues about Ed’s true feelings for Doris are strewn throughout the movie. We see them playing church bingo together, and Ed explains why he’s there: “I wasn’t crazy about the game, but…I dunno. It made her happy.” He says these words (like all other words) in such a dry, flat, uninflected tone that it’s easy to ignore or dismiss their clear implication, which is that Doris’ happiness is important to him. Later, gazing at Doris while she sleeps, he begins to tell the story of how they met and got married, but is interrupted when the phone rings. He then leaves the house, proceeds to kill someone, returns home to find Doris still sleeping, and launches right back into the story of their courtship, as if nothing had happened. Murder is just a distraction from the essential. “She looked at me as I was a dope,” he says of Doris, thinking back on the marriage proposal, “which I never really minded from her.” The guy couldn’t be more smitten. He’s just smitten in a way that’s diametrically opposed to the swoony version to which we’re accustomed, and by a person whose brusque treatment of him makes her seem, to us, unworthy of such pure adoration.

That’s also the only plausible explanation for The Man Who Wasn’t There’s most peculiar scene: a flashback (presumably) that occurs while Ed is unconscious following a car accident. What’s odd about this memory is how utterly mundane it is. Sitting idly on his front porch, Ed is chatted up by a salesman (Christopher McDonald) pitching the benefits of tar macadam (a.k.a. tarmac) for one’s driveway. Doris arrives home in the middle of the pitch and tells the salesman to get lost. They both go inside, Ed starts to say something, and Doris stops him. That’s it. This brief reverie has no narrative function whatsoever, and doesn’t even seem to directly address any of the psychological elements in play. The Coens clearly put it there for a reason, however, and its apparent irrelevance, paradoxically, positions it as the movie’s secret answer key. (See also Fargo’s seemingly extraneous Mike Yanagita scene, which actually spurs Marge to solve the case.)

The Coens show remarkable, arguably quixotic faith in viewers’ ability to pick up on subtle details and extrapolate an entire mindset from them. At the beginning of the flashback, Ed looks at his watch; the film cuts from his glance to a close-up of the watch face, just to emphasize the point. Why does that matter? We don’t know when this scene occurs, nor do we have any reason to think that the time of day is important. No prior scene instructed Ed to be ready at 3:15pm, or anything like that. He can only be looking at his watch because he’s wondering where Doris is, especially since she pulls up in her car just a couple of minutes later. He’s impatient for her to get home. In the meantime, he’s totally willing to listen to the macadam man’s sales pitch, which Doris treats as the intrusion that it is. Ed would be lost without her, at the mercy of unscrupulous others—which is exactly what happens in the film’s present tense, as the distance inspired by her infidelity leads him to make one disastrous decision after another. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking when, after the salesman leaves, Ed makes what’s almost surely a rare attempt to open up emotionally and gets shut down by an exhausted Doris, who says merely “I’m fine.” There’s potentially an unspoken undercurrent (where was Doris coming from?), but it remains a mystery.

Still, despite the Coens’ prankish and/or self-protective urge to obfuscate—I’m not even addressing the film’s religious subtext, which is largely conveyed through Ed’s fascination with UFOs—they do ultimately state their intentions quite clearly. Ed winds up in the electric chair, albeit for the wrong murder. A prison official shaves one of Ed’s legs in preparation for attaching an electrode to it, swirling the razor through a bucket of water to clear it of whiskers. It’s no accident that this visually echoes an earlier scene in which Ed shaves Doris’ legs while she’s in the bath, an act that the brothers shoot in a way that makes it looks downright reverential (though at the time that moment is more easily perceived as an act of humiliation tied to his profession). And Ed’s final thoughts before his life is extinguished are both eloquent and plain:

“I don’t know where I’m being taken. I don’t know what I’ll find beyond the earth and sky. But I’m not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don’t understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don’t have words for here.”

Ed Crane is a deeply closeted romantic, and The Man Who Wasn’t There is the work of two deeply closeted humanists. Lurking beneath the film’s deceptively nostalgic surface—the stark, monochrome photography; the rueful voiceover narration; the period detail; the familiar genre trappings—is an acute, affecting tale of passion that’s not so much repressed as it is carefully hidden, like an irreplaceable treasure. And lurking beneath that is a message that few, at the time, bothered to decode: We care.

Werner Herzog, that hypnotic German filmmaker who once tried to murder his leading man, who taunted death atop a soon-to-erupt volcano, and who looking upon the screeching Amazon mused that he saw only pain and misery in the jungle, was on a press tour. He sat beside his producer Jim McNiel, both bundled up in the Park City cold, and listened politely as the Los Angeles Times’ Steve Zeitchik asked about his new film.

It was 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival, and Herzog’s latest documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World made its debut in the festival’s Doc Premieres section. The film saw Herzog turning his inimitable lens to the ramifications of modern technology, and initial reviews (at least those counted by Rotten Tomatoes) were uniformly positive. One critic for The Young Folkssaid Herzog took “the same adventurous spirit that made him drag a cruise ship across a Peruvian jungle in Fitzcarraldo” and put it toward exploring “the labyrinth of the internet’s history.” Many more remarked on the film’s wondrous, sobering, and truly Herzogian revelations about man’s place in the midst of an unprecedented technological revolution.

Zeitchik asked Herzog directly, why make a film about the internet?

“We should know in which world we are living,” he responded. “As thinking people, we should try to scrutinize our environment and know in which world we live.”

Well, this is the world in which we live:

Lo and Behold is a commercial.

It was produced by Massachusetts-based network management company NetScout, in conjunction with New York ad agency Pereira & O’Dell; borne not from Herzog’s own passions, but from those of a marketing team seeking to promote a corporation in the midst of a massive rebranding effort. Marketers might bristle at the exact term, “commercial,” preferring instead the term “branded content,” one tool in an industry-wise trend towards nearly-invisible advertising meant to implant a positive perception of a company’s identity.

After Lo and Behold played Sundance, several reviewers mentioned NetScout had provided the funding, but not one writer took that detail further. Critics focused on the film’s structure and Herzog’s larger-than-life persona, and no one stopped to ask just who NetScout was, and why they had made this film. Perhaps it was the promise of Herzog’s integrity and character he had fought and earned for himself throughout his career as cinema’s wild man that kept anyone from asking questions. In what world could the man, who has braved deserts, the antarctic, and war zones in the tireless pursuit of filmmaking, sell out?

Branding Cinema

Historically when one spoke of the cross section of advertising and filmmaking, they spoke of product placement – James Bond drinking Heineken in Skyfall, Tom Cruise wearing Aviators in Top Gun, or E.T.’s beloved Reese’s Pieces. But something different happens when advertising agencies realize that they don’t just have to tag-along on a film, but can influence its very structure.

In the late 1990s, while scripting Cast Away, Tom Hanks and William Broyles Jr. approached FedEx with an unusual offer. They said let us use your company’s likeness, and in exchange you can help produce the film. Hanks and Broyles’ problem was that the inciting event of Cast Away was the gruesomely detailed crash of a plane branded with FedEx’s markings.

Company representatives recalled to The Chicago Tribune:

“[FedEx spokeswoman Sandra] Munoz said FedEx decided that the script highlighting the company’s humble origins, its global reach and can-do spirit outweighed the aircraft disaster. FedEx provided filming locations at its package sorting hubs in Memphis, Los Angeles and Moscow, as well as airplanes, trucks, uniforms and logistical support. A team of FedEx marketers oversaw production through more than two years of filming.”

This new relationship in which a third party’s marketing team oversaw the production of a high-budget film, foretold a major change in the way companies and cinema interact.

A managing director for FedEx said, “As we stepped back and looked at it, we thought, ‘It’s not product placement, we’re a character in this movie.’ […] It’s not just a product on the screen. It transcends product placement.”

In 2001, a year after Cast Away, BMW pioneered their cinematic ad series “The Hire.” The premise was simple: Clive Owen posed through a series of stylish, high-production value action shorts. “The Hire” played at Cannes and was so successful that – in what must be some kind of a first – the Jason Statham hit The Transporter was based on the ads. The genius of “The Hire” is that they are not films about BMW, but films in which the style and power of the automobile act as the architectural underlay for a compelling narrative.

This is branded content. It is not an attempt to insert a brand into a work of art, but to insert a work of art into the brand. As Naomi Klein once described it: ”the goal [of a corporation] is no longer association, but merger with the culture.”

Branded content is a graffiti artist covertly painting original work for a video game company, or a vodka brand working with a music festival to promote gender equality. At its best, it is The Lego Movie, in which the sensory experience of playing with LEGO blocks is lovingly evoked to tell a story. That film’s careful digital animation stands as not just some of the most impeccably textural filmmaking ever attempted, but as a cruise missile of nostalgia aimed at the viewer. The Lego Movienearly doubled the worth of its parent corporation.

Such a thing has never really existed in film before, but it is very similar to the early years of television, when companies like US Steel, Alcoa, or Kraft would pick up the tab for a show in exchange for the prestige of having their name on it. A great deal of powerful programs were produced in this era of television, but none free from compromises. Rod Serling was just one of many talented writers who found themselves increasingly stymied by his sponsors’ patter of seemly changes. In the introduction to the paperback edition of his great teleplay “Patterns,” Serling cautioned us about mixing corporations and art: “I think it is a basic truth that no dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training, interest and instincts are cut of entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gen­tlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.”

Censorship eventually drove Serling from writing about contemporary society to The Twilight Zone, where he could explore his stories of intolerance and bigotry in a politically-neutral fantasia.

A NetScout Production

Founded in 1984, NetScout specializes in network systems, producing both hardware and software. It was an early developer of packet sniffers, the technology that logs data being transferred over networks. Today, according to its own online bio, NetScout has a heavy focus on cybersecurity, anti-DDoS and Advanced Threat Solutions tech. It also provides web service performance platforms, cloud management, and packet brokers, among many other interconnected divisions.

All this to say, the company operates behind the scenes. It is not purchasing Super Bowl ad time to become a household name, rather its financial investments lie in the sustained prominence and upkeep of the internet’s infrastructure.

The seed of Lo and Behold formed in 2015, when NetScout was in the midst of a massive company-wide rebrand led by its then-CMO Jim McNiel, who would later participate next to Herzog in the film’s publicity tour. The company had spent the previous year making major corporate acquisitions, including the communications sector of Danaher Corporation, Arbor Networks, Fluke Networks, Tektronix Communications, and VSS Monitoring. The shopping spree consolidated their share of the communications market and helped the company more than double its revenue to the $1.3 billion it generates today. But NetScout remained a largely unheard of entity outside of the inner circle of the network management industry it had helped pioneer in the 1980’s. The company needed a way to boost its status and reach new clients.

And so, Lo and Behold was born in the walls of Pereira & O’Dell’s New York office, where the agency has serviced clients such as Intel, Fifth Third Bank, and Procter & Gamble.

It was Pereira & O’Dell’s executive creative director Dave Arnold who approached McNiel with a fresh, but risky idea. They would make a feature length documentary celebrating the creation of the internet and the boundless potential of its future. It would engage consumers with a focus on the importance of the technological innovations being made today, and toast the creators and engineers who contract with NetScout for their cybersecurity and hardware needs. The kicker: It would be directed by Werner Herzog.

In a 2016 AdWeek reflection on the film, McNiel wrote that Herzog initially balked at the idea, telling NetScout: “No! I do not do commercials.”

But McNiel managed to convince Herzog the film was not a commercial, but a serious documentary that would explore the world-changing and potentially apocalyptic ramifications of the internet.

Speaking to McNiel this month, he told us there was no second choice for a director. If Herzog couldn’t be won over, the entire project would be scrapped. Why?

“He’s an icon,” McNiel said. “And he’s a meme!”

Herzog the Meme

Popular arthouse directors have long been a favorite target for ad firms. This past year, Herzog’s friend and collaborator Errol Morris directed a series of 56 commercials for Wealthsimple, in which celebrities from all walks, including himself, tell anecdotes about handling their own finances. Wes Anderson has made ads for American Express, Darren Aronofsky has been recruited by Yves Saint Laurent, and Ridley Scott has made advertising history time again with his Hovis, Chanel, and Apple ads.

Many renowned directors from Scott to David Fincher to George Romero got their start making commercials. In Japan, Nobuhiko Obayashi was so good at TV spots he was given free reign by Toho to make his psychedelic freakout cult classic House. Even David Lynch, one of the staunchest opponents of product placement in cinema, has made commercials for Playstation, Gucci, and Clearblue Pregnancy Test. When asked during a Q&A if he finds this hypocritical, he answered bluntly: “I do sometimes [direct] commercials to make money.”

For Lynch, if the ads don’t bleed into the art then there is no reason for purists to hold directors’ advertising works against them; after all Inland Empire probably didn’t pay very many bills. Spike Lee has even opened up his own ad agency, and often blurs the line between his core filmography and his ad work, licensing to Nike and performing as his Mars Blackmon character from She’s Gotta Have It, retroactively making his feature debut something akin to after-the-fact branded content.

But Herzog was different. He came from the roiling, unfettered New German Cinema of Syberberg and Fassbinder, where they ranted and bled and snorted endless coke for their art. And even among that crowd, he was different. He came from the fringes, growing up in the mountains of Bavaria and making his first films with a camera he stole from a local university. In the 1970s and ‘80s, while his contemporaries in the movement like Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders went mainstream, he kept his distance. His adventures in storytelling have taken him to every continent on the planet, and he has further cemented his legend with tales of being arrested, threatened at gunpoint, forging documents, and picking locks to forbidden zones all in the pursuit of cinema. Alone, the troubled making of Fitzcarraldo has probably done more than anything else to create the idea of Werner Herzog in the mind of western audiences, that of a madman mystic lost in the jungle chasing truth and art while eschewing formulaic Hollywood methods of filmmaking. His explicit anti-commercialism has made him appear incorruptible to his fans, who still at every chance possible put on impersonations of his signature Black Forest accent.

McNiel is right. In the era of the internet, Herzog has become a meme. Many new fans are coming to his works for the first time through YouTube clips from Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams, about the making of Fitzcarraldo. Herzog’s off-the-cuff speech from the documentary about the Amazon jungle representing “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder” has been uploaded a half a dozen times with tens to hundreds of thousands of hits on each clip, including one by its DVD distributor The Criterion Collection. Comedian Paul F. Tompkins has made Herzog one of his most memorable celebrity impersonations. His more misanthropic quotes have been turned into “Demotivational Posters” by internet users, and Know Your Meme has a full entry dedicated to exploring his presence as a joke online.

Herzog is aware of the online perception of his public persona, and although he has not exactly embraced it he has said it does not bother him and he is content to let parody Twitter accounts exist. As a result, fans who participate in this meme-ification continue to build his mythology. It is through these parodies that the idea of Herzog as a savant, able to pierce through the veil of civilization to reveal humanity’s dark nature, is allowed to flourish. It flourishes because Herzog is authentic, because he is a lawbreaker, an explorer, a true independent.

There is a phrase for the unquestioning devotion to Herzog’s work: Brand loyalty. It is this brand that NetScout sought to tap into it. The hiring of Herzog was as clear-eyed and purposeful as any good corporate acquisition. His prestige (or “brand equity,” as a corporate board of directors might put it) opened doors that NetScout’s opaque public image kept shut. McNiel confirmed this: “We did not really get any flat-out rejections [from interview subjects]. After all, this was Werner calling.”

Designing “The Connected World”

Since Lo and Behold’s primary purpose was to serve as an innovative business-to-business marketing initiative, it would need to speak to corporate clients by highlighting the world-changing technologies they were pioneering and celebrating the radical social impact their developments have had on the world.

It was McNiel who came up with the film’s 10 chapter structure and the list of interviewees. Prize gets like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos couldn’t fit Herzog into their schedule, but others like Elon Musk and hacker icon Kevin Mitnick did. According to McNiel, Herzog did conduct his own research and suggested names, and the film came together as a collaboration.

By the end of post-production, McNiel and Herzog had delivered an unique feature that was simultaneously, fascinating, existential, and most importantly a subtle monument of advertising.

But why then did it premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, which still insists it is an independent showcase run by a non-profit?

On social media, branded content is typically flagged with phrases like “Sponsored Content” or “Paid.” But there are no guidelines in place for branded films (indeed no authorities to even issue them). Minor steps are being taken to separate the branded from regular films; Sundance took one such step in 2016 with the debut of their Digital Storytelling showcase specifically for branded content. But that very same year, Lo and Behold played as a traditional documentary instead. Was this another door that the Herzog brand flung open for NetScout?

Each year, thousands of prospective filmmakers, many truly independent, many self-financed and motivated by love of the art and by a desire to have their unique voice amplified, spend $85 for the privilege of having their feature film considered at Sundance – that number goes down to $65 if they’re early and up to a whopping $110 if they’re late. They do the same at Toronto, SXSW, Cannes, Tribeca, Berlin, and the hundreds to thousands of festivals launched nominally in support of independent cinema. Sundance took around 2,000 such submissions last year – likely around $180,000, not including short films. Many filmmakers spend thousands of their own dollars on submissions. There has been remarkably little discussion about the fact that their films will be judged not just against the latest low-budget Hollywood productions indie-laundered through smaller production houses, but now, it seems, also against branded content: the agenda-driven works of telecom giants, car manufacturers, toy empires, and fast food chains.

Advertisers have found a new integrity in iconoclasticism. It is not a long leap from NetScout’s employment of Herzog as a modern-day Rasputin to, say, Wendy’s restaurants’ pugnacious Twitter feed. Each seeks to legitimize their company as an honest and self-aware organism, as idiosyncratic and hip as any of us. They are corporations seeking to become that thing they were asserted to be in the 2012 presidential campaign: People.

For the advertisers, it is simply work. They are upfront about their goals and tactics and trade publications frequently profile the individuals developing these campaigns. Often, there is an earnestness, talent, and true passion in their efforts.

“There does need to be some connection between what it is you’re trying to communicate, because you need to be passionate about it,” McNiel said. “The only way this stuff gets any kind of lift is if it’s regarded as real cinema.”

So branded content seeks to slide itself into our lives undetected, emulating the form and scope of “real” cinema.

However, the unusual thing about branded content is not that companies outside the film industry are attempting to make money off of films. Rather, it is that they are unconcerned with making money. Even mega-franchise films like The Avengers tend to proceed from the inside out — a college of production and distribution companies attempts to live off a product. The work of art drives the revenue, and success or failure as a company is based off the success or failure of the film.

But branded content is more opaque. Its success is judged not so much by how well the film itself does financially (a modest documentary like Lo and Behold fits snugly within NetScout’s significant marketing budget), but by softer concepts like reach and influence. Jim McNiel was candid on this point, telling us that “the primary benefit to NetScout behind the film is the number of impressions and perceptions about NetScout” (In the year following Lo and Behold’s premiere, NetScout’s annual media impressions jumped from an average 1.5 - 2.5 billion to more than 25 billion). Advertising is a medium designed to make you feel a certain way about a company. Couple this knowledge with cinema’s proven track record at affecting the audiences’ biases and assumptions and one need not be zealously anti-corporate to worry about the potential for future branded content to misrepresent and mislead the audience.

The Two Werner Herzogs

In early 1954, at the height of the housing segregation issue, while Brown vs. Board of Education was still being heard in the Supreme Court, the most infamous example of early television censorship occurred. Reginald Rose, the celebrated writer behind 12 Angry Men, debuted his new standalone episode for the television series Westinghouse Studio One. Called “Thunder on Sycamore Street,” the episode was based on the true story of a black family moving into a white neighborhood, and their neighbors’ slow plummet into racial violence. The Westinghouse people loved the script for its passion and realism, but had one small, insignificant change: the black family must be changed to, well, anything else. There was no way they would air a program about white Americans attacking black Americans. It was simply too hot a topic for mid-fifties audiences. So Rose re-wrote the script, and the episode that aired was about mob violence against a white family with an ex-convict father. The moral meat of the teleplay was pulled out entirely, but Westinghouse simply could not risk people thinking of that when they shopped for appliances.

It is difficult to know the extent to which such decorous censorship happened with Lo and Behold. A large chunk of the film is devoted to the negative impact of the internet – most hauntingly in an interview with the family of a teenager, Nikki Catsouras, whose gory death in a car crash became a shock image meme. When Catsouras’ mother confesses that she thinks the internet is the modern-day face of the Antichrist, it seems for a moment that the film has at last found its bite. Such melanges of trauma and focused mania are hallmarks of Herzog’s best work. Those qualities are explored in the lion’s share of his films, from the surreal Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans to the tragic The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser to the fire-breathing Klaus Kinski performances of his most famous work, and, most pointedly, to his 1981 documentary God’s Angry Man, in which he studies a particularly fiery televangelist.

But the section with the Catsouras family is all too brief. They tell the bullet-points of their story and are gone, as we rush to the next location. Whether that was Herzog’s choice or not, it is difficult to know, but the thumbnail structure of Lo and Behold is a new and unique problem for the veteran filmmaker.

Jim McNiel told us that “the challenge with working with Werner is kind of keeping him from going too far down into the shadow of darkness.” However, he believed the dark elements were important to show, as too much praise of the future without conflict would make for a flat story. Focusing on the darker elements, he reasoned, would equally highlight the film’s more positive moments, allowing for the intended good vs. evil narrative to take hold.

Still, McNiel reported having to rein Herzog in when he went too dark, and it is perhaps his inability to submerge the film in those depths that leaves Herzog appearing at times more unsure of his subject than any other documentary he’s made, except perhaps for his ten minute short on the middling rock band The Killers, promoting American Express’ 2012 Unstaged concert series. While we have alternate terminology available for Lo and Behold, and for his road safety PSA From One Second to the Next(made for AT&T), we have no earthly idea what to call The Killers: Unstaged except a commercial.

After Lo and Behold premiered, it seems only New Republic’s Will Leitch worried about this new side of Herzog. He wrote: “It’s probably a fair question to ask at this point: Do Werner Herzog’s movies need quite so much Werner Herzog in them? There has been a growing fear among longtime admirers of Herzog’s films, of which I am certainly one, that Herzog the Public Personality has been starting to sneak in around the edges of Herzog the Director, and to ill effect.”

But Leitch’s distinctions between Herzog the Public Personality and Herzog the Director are miscalibrated, in the wake of his more recent, prosaic films like Queen of the Desert and Salt and Fire, which reviewers seemed to grit their teeth and swallow like medicine. The division between the Herzogs is more acute.

Until 2005, every Herzog documentary was self-produced by Werner Herzog Filmproduktion and distributed by various high-end channels like Canal+. This changed with Grizzly Man, his 2005 film about the life and death of Timothy Treadwell. That film was co-produced by Discovery Docs, the documentary arm of the Discovery Channel. Grizzly Man is a true masterpiece, one of his best films, and the presence of the Discovery Channel is a natural fit for the material (not least because their 1999 teledoc made Treadwell famous), but for the first time, Herzog made a documentary on someone else’s dime and under the control of a massive corporation. Further, it elevated Herzog to a new level of fame. No longer was he being interviewed by dry cineaste magazines, but on late night talk shows. And his personality was built for internet celerity. Look at the 2007 interview in which someone shoots him in the leg with an air rifle mid-conversation. His unruffled reaction was a minor Internet sensation, and Herzog still tells the anecdote on talk shows, though he often forgets to mention it was an air rifle, not a real rifle, that shot him.

The marriage of Herzog with US media giants was so successful that his next film, Rescue Dawn, was an MGM star-vehicle remake of one of his own, earlier documentaries. By 2012, Herzog was recutting others’ footage, adding narration, and packaging it as his own creation with Happy People: A Year in Taiga. Critics accepted the packaging at face value. There was no secret about Happy People, which Herzog condensed from a Russian television program, but critics were content to discuss “Herzog’s motives,” with hardly a thought for the man who actually went to Siberia and shot it, Dmitry Vasyuko.

In a very real way, Grizzly Man is a line in Werner Herzog’s filmography, marking the moment he became a Hollywood filmmaker. No Herzog documentary before Grizzly Man was produced by a third party; and no Herzog film (fiction or non-) since Grizzly Man has been an independent project. Yet our mode of discussion for the man has not updated since Fitzcarraldo, thirty six years and certainly several million dollars ago.

By and large, Werner Herzog is still spoken of as the young man shooting Aguirre on a mountaintop with a stolen camera and a gun in his waistband. Still remembered as the sad-eyed mystic observing that nature is “overwhelming and collective murder.” But the late Les Blank, who filmed the infamous speech about the jungle for Burden of Dreams, was perplexed by the public’s response to the man. He told Vice: “And the first time I heard it, I thought it was purely tragic. But I soon showed the film to an audience in San Diego where I screened some works in progress, and people started laughing when they heard Herzog’s speech. It never occurred to me that what he said was funny. To me, it was very painful, and I felt sorry for the guy because he was driven to that point of view.”

Herzog seems to have drifted from the pain Blank saw in him, towards the comic irony the San Diego audience imagined. Married, stable, in LA, he has changed from an uncompromising European artist to a wealthy California-based celebrity who stops in for guest appearances in everything from Jack Reacher to Rick and Morty. He is now a talk-show circuit veteran, host of an online film school, and a regular director of branded content for multinationals.

He has become a brand. And he is content to build that brand. Perhaps he never intended this to happen, but it’s impossible to deny this is where he has arrived.

We are left with the paradox of two Werner Herzogs. Cinephiles simultaneously believe in Herzog the Philosopher who probes at hidden truths and is pathologically immune to the artifice of Hollywood, and in Herzog the Celebrity who is comfortable hamming it up in cartoons and talk shows.

Branding in the end is simply commodification; and the buying and selling of Werner Herzog extends beyond the bounds of his movies. He now runs a “Rogue Film School,” where lucky participants can attend a four day seminar including a one day meet and greet, all for a $25 non-refundable application fee and a $1500 seminar fee (with a $200 cancellation fee, god forbid), not including room or board. There, Herzog will presumably speak on how film is “not for the weak-hearted,” how it is a rarified domain only for those sturdy enough to break rules, pick locks, flaunt police, and, apparently, plunk down $1525 for a meet and greet. Those of us unable to make the cut can watch six hours of his film lessons at masterclass.com for the relatively cut rate price of $90. At MasterClass he teaches virtually alongside that other great outsider artist, Ron Howard.

By all means, there is no rule against artists, even great artists, selling out. Picasso and Orson Welles made a career out of it and their legacies remain intact. But as marketing schools teach that a brand is a promise, so we should ask what is the promise of the Herzog brand?

In 2007, Roger Ebert, to whom Encounters at the End of the World was dedicated, wrote in an open letter:

“Without ever making a movie for solely commercial reasons, without ever having a dependable source of financing, without the attention of the studios and the oligarchies that decide what may be filmed and shown, you have directed at least 55 films or television productions, and we will not count the operas. You have worked all the time, because you have depended on your imagination instead of budgets, stars or publicity campaigns. You have had the visions and made the films and trusted people to find them, and they have. It is safe to say you are as admired and venerated as any filmmaker alive–among those who have heard of you, of course. Those who do not know your work, and the work of your comrades in the independent film world, are missing experiences that might shake and inspire them.”

That is the Werner Herzog that was. An intense, comprehensive honesty, and a legacy of films driven from within, committed to truth.

That is the man the film community has never let go, even as we have another Werner Herzog: a television personality hawking self-improvement courses alongside Gordon Ramsey and Steph Curry.

To Whom Are We Beholden?

Lo and Behold represents the success of a brand carefully cultivated, marketed, and exploited. But that brand is not NetScout. Herzog’s wandering spirit, his philosophical integrity and aversion to banal civilization were repackaged and sold back to his audience. Just as LL Bean trades on its legacy as workwear for outdoorsmen to sell khakis to yuppies, Werner Herzog trades on his legacy as an Amazonian explorer to sell American Express and AT&T to an adoring film community.

Upton Sinclair once said that all art is propaganda. Likely he was correct. And so we should always be on guard, asking ourselves just what each piece of art we experience is propagandizing, and why.

Werner Herzog has spent his entire career insisting on the difference between fact and truth. “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema,” he wrote in his 1999 Minnesota Declaration, “and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth.” There also must be an ecstatic lie, in which we are led beautifully and elegantly to a dead end. Herzog also observed in that declaration: “Tourism is a sin.” And here we have Werner Herzog: Tour Guide, helping an internet security company tell us of the importance of internet security.

It is all, in the end, innocuous. NetScout has simply made an impactful film that effectively serves and works beyond its marketing origins. But will the general practice remain innocuous if another great filmmaker makes an invisible propaganda piece for say, a charter school think tank (as graced many festivals in 2009), or a toxin-spewing corporation like Monsanto (whose use of weed killer glysophate is defended by Neil DeGrasse Tyson in another industry-funded documentary), or a weapons manufacturer? What are the ethical limits of a festival like Sundance – both for creating a space for true independent cinema, and for ensuring audiences and critics know just who made their film and why?

Sundance above all has been cursed by its success. The always-elusive balance between industry access and big-money irrelevance has been especially difficult to find in Park City. A 2010 Time profile has festival founder Robert Redford worrying that “Sundance has been ‘sliding’ of late, blaming ‘ambush marketers’ for taking over storefronts to promote their swag and celebrities who just show up for the paparazzi attention.”

Was Lo and Behold essentially another example of Redford’s dreaded ambush marketing? Certainly yes. Was Werner Herzog just another celebrity showing up for paparazzi attention? Certainly not.

But it is, perhaps, because of the latter, that the film community failed to see the former. If the people who are paid to scrutinize and agonize over films missed this, what hope does any viewer have in the future to know who made the movies they’re seeing and for what purpose?

When Katy Perry’s “Firework” begins playing for the first time in Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, it’s not especially noticeable. The song is part of the background music at Marineland, the aquatic park where Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) works as an orca trainer, one of several upbeat pop songs that serve to get the crowd excited during the routine animal performances in the outdoor amphitheater. It’s only after the minute-long section of the song has ended, and the soundtrack has shifted to tense orchestral music, that it becomes clear how indelibly “Firework” will be seared into Stephanie’s psyche, probably for the rest of her life.

The presence of contemporary pop songs like “Firework,” especially in mainstream Hollywood movies, is usually unremarkable and often little more than an afterthought, with songs just as likely chosen for marketing purposes as for artistic ones. But filmmakers with strong visions can harness the undeniable power of a huge pop hit like “Firework” and transform it into an essential storytelling tool, as Audiard does in Rust and Bone and as the directors of the far more multiplex-friendly movies The Interview and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted do as well. It may be a coincidence that the filmmakers behind all three movies chose “Firework” for the most pivotal and memorable moments in their films, but it’s no coincidence that Perry’s empowerment anthem has the ability to speak to artists with very different creative goals.

Written by Perry along with Ester Dean, StarGate, and Sandy Vee and taken from Perry’s 2010 album Teenage Dream, “Firework” is one of Perry’s biggest hits, and it seems tailor-made for the movies, with its soaring earworm chorus and its inspirational lyrics that are specific enough to stick in your mind (the singular use of “firework” is especially uncommon) but generic enough to apply to almost any situation involving believing in yourself and pursuing your dreams. It’s not necessarily a great song, but it’s the right song for what each of these films is aiming to convey at a particular moment.

The second time that “Firework” surfaces in Rust and Bone, about 50 minutes after the first, its significance is clear: Stephanie is now in a wheelchair, following an accident that left her legs severed below the knee. The choreographed performance between orcas and trainers, set to “Firework,” was the last thing she experienced before her terrible injury, and the song is now a symbol of the life she’s lost and has struggled to rebuild. Much of that rebuilding has come from her burgeoning relationship with Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), an underground mixed martial-arts fighter and itinerant laborer who has shown her more compassion and patience than anyone else in her life. The two have just had sex for the first time, in a scene that is sweet and passionate and a little awkward, and Ali has left Stephanie’s apartment with a casual farewell that doesn’t match her clearly stronger feelings of attachment.

Vulnerable yet undaunted, Stephanie sits on her balcony, Audiard’s camera first capturing her from behind. As Audiard cuts to a side view of Stephanie, she slowly starts miming the hand motions from her aquatic performance, first in silence and then as “Firework” gradually fades in on the soundtrack. As it does in most instances in all three of these movies, the song begins here with the line “Ignite the light and let it shine,” sparking the light in Stephanie’s eyes as her hands are outstretched and open. The song builds to its chorus as her motions become more confident, forceful. Her expression goes from wistful to triumphant, her hands poised and powerful, pumping to the beat. As the song continues to play, Audiard cuts to Stephanie, using a cane and her new prosthetic legs, walking for the first time into the empty amphitheater where she used to perform. She’s finally found the inner strength to confront her trauma, and while a lot of that came from Ali, plenty of it came from Katy Perry, too.

There’s a surprising amount of emotional power to the use of “Firework” in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Interview as well, even if it first appears as the target of a somewhat obvious joke. Vain talk show host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his more pragmatic producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) have traveled to North Korea to interview dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), an apparent superfan of Dave’s vapid celebrity-interview show. They’ve also been tasked by a CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan) with secretly assassinating Kim, although Dave has started to bond with the lonely despot, who has a secret fondness for cheesy American culture.

What better representative for bubblegum American pop in the early ’10s than “Firework”? When Dave and Kim are sitting in a Soviet tank that Kim says was a gift to his father from Joseph Stalin, Dave turns on the internal sound system, to Kim’s protests, and soon “Firework” starts playing softly (beginning, of course, with “Ignite the light and let it shine”). Kim stammers that he’s never heard the song before, but Dave the ugly American loves Katy Perry, and immediately starts singing along. That opens the flood gates for Kim, who admits to loving margaritas and identifying with the opening line of “Firework.” “You know Dave, sometimes I feel like a plastic bag …” he begins, and Dave finishes: “Drifting through the wind?” Kim does a little dance, and their bond is solidified.

Rogen and Goldberg cap the joke by turning the volume up on “Firework,” shifting it from the tinny diegetic sounds of the tank’s internal speakers to blaring and pulsing on the soundtrack, over a montage of Dave and Kim triumphantly riding the tank through the adjacent woods, and then blowing up a bunch of trees as they sing along to Perry’s “Boom, boom, boom!” “Firework” goes from a secret guilty pleasure to the anthem of their friendship and their glee over wanton destruction.

It’s a silly, fun bit in a movie that mostly exists to turn serious geopolitics into silly fun, but that fun takes a dark (if still comedic) turn when “Firework” comes back near the end of the movie. Now disillusioned about their alleged friendship, Dave wants to expose Kim as a fraud, during the internationally televised interview. Pressing Kim to reveal his emotional weaknesses, Dave pulls out the one thing he knows will get a response: “I just have one more question for you: Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?” As Dave sings the lyrics, Kim breaks down crying, revealing to the world that he’s a scared little boy inside. If it’s possible to feel sympathy for a cartoonish version of Kim Jong-un in a gross-out comedy, then this is the point at which that happens.

Directors Eric Darnell, Conrad Vernon and Tom McGrath don’t have nearly as much on their minds for their use of “Firework” in the third Madagascar animated movie, but the song nevertheless provides the backbone for the movie’s most visually inventive sequence, probably the most memorable moment in the entire Madagascar series. For reasons that are far too convoluted to get into, the series’ main zoo-animal characters—lion Alex (voiced by Ben Stiller), zebra Marty (Chris Rock), hippo Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) and giraffe Melman (David Schwimmer)—are hiding out with the animals of a circus traveling through Europe, and they need to wow an American promoter in order to get a contract to perform in New York City (which will bring the zoo animals home).

After witnessing the sad state of the circus acts, the main characters take it upon themselves to overhaul the entire show, despite their complete lack of circus knowledge. There certainly isn’t a lot of realism in the Madagascar movies, but Europe’s Most Wanted takes things in an especially absurdist and surreal direction, even before the trippy “Firework” sequence, which is entirely divorced from physics or logic. The make-or-break performance opens with surly Russian tiger Vitaly (Bryan Cranston) attempting to re-create a legendary stunt that went wrong, as he jumps through a flaming hoop that looks about the size of a wedding ring. After he somehow manages that feat, the crowd goes wild, and Vitaly extinguishes the tiny ring of fire, picks up the baton that was holding the ring and places it in the ground—and the movie transforms into a kaleidoscopic dreamscape.

There’s no gradual fade-in as “Firework” starts here; this is not a movie interested in subtlety. Once again, it begins with “Ignite the light and let it shine,” and the light here is literal: There’s an explosion of color as Vitaly’s baton activates a swirling, multi-colored platform like something out of a Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show, only reaching impossibly high, taller than even the tallest circus tent. There’s no sense of physical limitations as the movie presents a bear on a motorcycle riding perpendicular to the crowd in the stands; dogs on rocket-powered skates shooting out what look like actual fireworks; Alex and sultry jaguar Gia flinging themselves about on rings of pure colored lights (which then become cannons to shoot other animals into the air); Melman and Gloria walking tightropes that are simply beams of light; and elephants shooting multi-hued flames from their trunks. The crowd goes wild, but it’s impossible to tell where the crowd even is, in relation to the performers.

On the Europe’s Most Wanted DVD commentary track, the directors note that editor Nick Fletcher specifically cut the circus sequence to “Firework,” demonstrating how important the song was to the movie’s development. Rogen, too, notes the importance of “Firework” to The Interview’s creative process in his DVD commentary: “Katy Perry is fucking cool as shit, and the fact that she let us do this is cool as shit,” he enthuses in his typical blunt manner. For his part, Audiard is more reserved about Rust and Bone’s wheelchair “Firework” scene, although it’s easily the movie’s most emotionally powerful moment, and a distillation of Cotillard’s masterful performance, as she conveys Stephanie’s difficult journey in just a few looks and hand movements. It was Cotillard, Audiard says on the movie’s commentary track, who convinced him to shoot the scene, which was initially just two lines in the script that he wasn’t sure he wanted to include. He ignited the light, and then she let it shine.

Halfway through my first viewing of Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch—as I tried to disengage from the negative criticism floating around the film, as I admitted I was not only getting sucked in, I was actually moved by all of it—a confused thought drifted into my head: “Am I crazy, or is this a little bit like Gold Diggers of 1933?” (That’s a rhetorical question, although I can already hear the response.) The thought was so ludicrous it felt like a hallucination, not to mention a sacrilege, but it kept nagging at me. Maybe 15, 20 minutes after that, there’s a scene where the evil pimp-orderly Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) comes into the rebellious girls’ ratty dressing room to read them the riot act. On the wall is a collage of old movie posters, and I got a brief flash of the words “GOLD DIGGERS” behind his head. I paused the film, and squinted at the screen.

The posters I could make out were:

— Night and Day, the 1946 biopic about Cole Porter, starring Cary Grant.
—Blues in the Night, the 1941 film about a guy putting together a jazz band.
— My Dream is Yours, the 1949 musical where Doris Day replaces a singer in his popular radio show.
— Thank Your Lucky Stars, the 1943 film about a wartime charity show, starring Eddie Cantor as himself.

Most notably, though, there was not one, not two, but three posters for various “Gold Diggers” film. (There had been many in the “franchise”: The Gold Diggers (1923), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), Gold Diggers of 1933/1935/37—released in each respective year, and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938).) The three overlapping posters created bristling antlers out of the word “Gold Diggers” flar-ing out around Oscar Isaac’s head.

These posters were obviously deliberate choices. Each movie is a musical about a musical, films about creating music, about putting on a show. The posters are a statement of intention. Or, at least, a statement of aspiration. They place Sucker Punch in a continuum, and, in a way, tell us how to watch the film. Starting out with a shot of a gloomy old-fashioned proscenium with dark curtains, Sucker Punch is a version of the “backstage” musical, complete with dance rehearsals filled with the pressure of putting on a good show. Gold Diggers of 1933, the best of the Gold Diggers films, casts a shadow longer than Sucker Punch can ever hope to do, but the two films operate in similar ways, using dizzying artificial worlds of fantasy as a bulwark against the harsh realities of life beyond the lights. But something happens in both films: the “fantasies” shine the spotlight onto urgent social and political concerns, and so they are not just escapes from reality. They expose reality.

The four scrappy tap-shoed “Gold Digger” girls trying to survive in a harsh world aren’t dissimilar to the five scrappy leotard-wearing girls in Sucker Punch, trying to escape the confines men—and a lunatic society—have put on them. The characters in both films discover escape hatches through elaborately staged “numbers. (In Gold Diggers, it’s the kaleidoscopic vision of choreographer Busby Berkeley; in Sucker Punch, it’s the alternate universes Babydoll creates whenever she dances.) These numbers reflect and distort the action going on just offstage. They are meta-commentaries on material that is already somewhat “meta.”

Critics scorched the earth so much in response to Sucker Punch that one might be inclined to tiptoe into the landscape tentatively, but this is ridiculous. You don’t have to “defend” a movie as though it’s a criminal. At the time of its release, there were a handful of critics—Danny Bowes, Sonny Bunch, and Betsy Sharkey, among them—who wrote about the film in a way I found intriguing. In their words, Sucker Punch sounded ambitious, bold, and maybe a little bit dumb. But also interesting. Ambitious failures are often more compelling than connect-the-dots successes. I found some of the defenses unconvincing (outside of the trio of writers I mentioned), in particular the “it’s a film about female empowerment!” chorus, written by mostly young male writers. (Anna Biller, director of the great The Love Witch, handled that type of argument once and for all in a recent essay, not about Sucker Punch but about the need, in general, to label films we love as “feminist" in order to justify loving them.) The queasily mixed messages of Sucker Punch are part of its unnerving mood, but it doesn’t need to be labeled as “feminist” or “it’s about empowerment!” in order to justify engaging with its onslaught of ideas and emotions. If you compare Sucker Punch’s critique of society’s treatment of women to a film like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, it seems like a pretty silly and surface-level story. And it is.

But Sucker Punch shows enormous empathy for the double-bind of women, the “damned if you do/don’t” realities of sexuality, the survival techniques women create to deflect how the world sees them. The film goes after a gaslighting patriarchal culture where women are, metaphorically, either in a mental institution or a brothel. Nobody will just let women be. Its world is a world run by men with a vested interest in keeping women divided and conquered. (One of the best parts of Sucker Punch is the cooperation and sympathy among the women. Even when they argue, there is space for different opinions. Gold Diggers of 1933, too, doggedly refuses to pit the women against each other. Even Ginger Rogers, the only one who’s truly a “gold digger,” is treated with eye-rolling humor by the others. It’s far closer to the actual reality of “female friendship” than a catfighting competition.) Sucker Punch pursues its targets with a CGI-generated sledgehammer wielded by a ponytailed girl in a babydoll dress. Its vision is hallucinatory and exaggerated, but the exaggeration makes its points in a refreshingly clear way.

The 6-minute “prologue” in Sucker Punch lays out the horrifying backstory of “Babydoll” (Emily Browning), all to the accompaniment of Browning’s whispered, dirge-like rendition of “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This.” The sequence is both ridiculous and a tour de force. I responded so strongly to the pain and pleasure of the images I wondered how much I was being manipulated. I answered my own question: This is total manipulation, but it’s extremely effective. Every scene surges with a barely controlled sense of injustice, desperate wish-fulfillment, outrage, and hope so strong it’s indistinguishable from loss. The world is one of Dickensian depravity poured through the paranoid filter of Ken Kesey. The message is way larger than the messenger.

Babydoll is thrown into an institution for the criminally insane, after accidentally killing her sister during a scuffle with their evil stepfather. Oscar Isaac, with Errol Flynn mustache, plays the subversive orderly, assuring Babydoll’s stepfather a lobotomy has been scheduled for next week. He leads Babydoll into what is known as “the theatre,” a gigantic echoing space where the other patients act out their aggressions, all under the watchful eye of Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino). Jon Hamm arrives to perform the lobotomy and Babydoll launches herself into a fantasy where the asylum is actually a brothel/strip club, with trapped girls “entertaining” high-rolling clients. The other girls—Sweetpea (Abbie Cornish) and her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung)—take Babydoll under their wing. In a cavernous rehearsal room, Babydoll is told by Gugino—now a den-mother who clearly started out as one of them—to dance. Babydoll sways back and forth and suddenly an entire world erupts, a world where she fights (and slays) a trio of gigantic samurai-robots. She is also given the tools for her escape by a character who shows up in each fantasy called Wise Man, played by Scott Glenn. When the “number” stops, everyone in the rehearsal hall is breathless and awestruck by her.

Throughout the rest of the film, Babydoll is called upon to dance over and over again to distract their male captors as the girls gather together the items they need to break free. Each dance creates a different universe. After the Samurai-Robot Ballet comes the Orc-Infested Battle of Leningrad, the Steampunk Nazi Show-down, the Fire-Breathing Dragon Tussle, and the Ticking Bomb on a Speeding Train Finale. In each, the girls transform into an Inglourious Basterds team of misfit Commandos, swaggering through danger, obliterating anything in their path. Zach Snyder’s imagination is on bombastic overdrive, but all of the actresses bring real feeling to the table. The film is Gothic horror, melodrama, and a music video, propelled by real trauma.

The Gold Diggers of 1933, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, with four now-classic numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley, clues us in early on that this will not be your regular “let’s put on a show” musical. (“Whats the show about?” “The Depression.” “We won’t have to rehearse that.”) “Remember My Forgotten Man,“ the explosive final number (more on that on a bit), is referenced early, by Barney (Ned Sparks), the producer of the show, who paints a word picture to the listening chorus girls:

“That’s what this show is about. The Depression. Men marching, marching in the rain, men marching, marching, jobs, jobs, and in the background Carol, the spirit of the Depression, a blues song - no, not a blues song, but a wailing, a wailing, and this gorgeous woman singing this song that will tear their hearts out, the big parade, the big parade of tears.”

The cold wind of the early ‘30s reality whips underneath the door of the standard musical. The three main characters—Carol (Joan Blondell), Trixie (Aline McMahon), and Polly (Ruby Keeler)—live in a dingy apartment, and all sleep in the same room, cramped in single beds. They steal bottles of milk chilling on other people’s fire escapes. They can’t pay their rent. When a meeting with a Broadway producer comes up, only one of them can go because there’s only one nice dress among the three of them. This is a backstage story, yes, but the stakes are more dire than “Will I become a star? Will the show be a hit?” They want the show to be a hit because it means they can pay rent, eat, buy their own milk. When Carol calls her friends to tell them the show’s a go, she sobs the news, her sobs filled with pure animal relief. On opening night, the composer Brad Roberts (Dick Powell) refuses to fill in as the lead of the show, and Trixie scolds him in no uncertain terms:

“You know what it means if this show doesn’t go on? You know what it means to the girls in this show? Those poor kids who gave up jobs and won’t ever be able to find another one in these times? Those kids who’ve been living on nothing, starving themselves for the 6 weeks we’ve been rehearsing, hoping for this show to go on to be a success? They’re counting on you. You can’t let them down. You can’t. If you do … well, God knows what’ll happen to those kids, they’ll have to do things I wouldn’t want on my conscience.”

This bleak picture of what failure will actually look like, including the specter of prostitution, licks at the heels of the spunky survival-minded girls and give Busby Berkeley’s numbers an electric charge, destabilizing the cliches of the genre. In “We’re In the Money,” the opening number, Ginger Rogers, in gigantic closeup, sings those sarcastic lyrics with a huge smile on her face, dressed in an outfit made up of gleaming coins, with a huge coin over her crotch area. That’s not subtext. That’s text.

The “Pettin’ in the Park” number is racy, considering what “petting” meant in the lingo of the era. It’s not just about sex, but public sex. Everything is hunky dory, with couples of all ages and races canoodling in the park, but then—maybe because Billy Barty (dressed as a baby, to creepy effect) ogles them to death—the women all put on corsets of tin, safe from the handsiness of men. In the final moment, though, Dick Powell whips out a can opener and pierces the tin on Ruby Keeler’s back! “Pettin’ in the Park” starts as totally sex-positive, and then Barty shows up and suddenly society is the bed of Procrustes again. Embracing the lack of escape—embracing the reality of Reality—allows for the famous final number, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” a head-on confrontation with tough truths, political and social, followed by a vision of powerful unity and collective mourning. It is a furious indictment of a society sending boys off to war and then rejecting them when they return, traumatized and clogging up the bread lines.

The number explodes all that came before it, and the reverb continues today. (Jack Warner hadn’t planned on closing out the film with “Remember My Forgotten Man,” but once he saw it he knew it couldn’t appear earlier.) The film bursts its seams. All of the personal stories in the film (Why doesn’t Brad want to go on-stage? Will J. Lawrence Bradford get the stick out of his ass? Will Carol and Trixie’s stunt go too far? Will the show be a hit?) are obliterated into dust by “Remember My Forgotten Man”’s vision of endless ranks of “men marching, march-ing in the rain, men marching, marching.” Filmed in possibly the most harrowing year of the Depression, “Remember My Forgotten Man” is what Gold Diggers is actually about. In that final number, Gold Diggers of 1933 throws open the doors, lets in the cold winter wind that’s been howling all along, and tells us what’s really on its mind.

Matthew Kennedy, in his Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes, calls it "perhaps the most socially urgent song ever conceived for an American musical film.” Indeed.

One doesn’t expect a backstage musical to indict an entire society, especially not in the final number. And one doesn’t look to a Zach Snyder movie for social commentary on the plight of women. But there you have it. It happened anyway.

It should go without saying that Sucker Punch is not even half the film of Gold Diggers of 1933. Gold Diggers of 1933 is a masterpiece. But Sucker Punch floats in the same territory, attempting to bring the real world into the dreamworld, targeting a cruel system, exploitation, and enmeshment. The story, as it exists—in its darkness and gigantism, its over-stylization and mood-poem montages—is not entirely in control of itself. Zach Snyder is not entirely in control of his own story. (It’s rare, but sometimes very good films emerge from directorial loss of control.) What the film unleashes is far more powerful than what’s actually onscreen.

In a lot of ways, Sucker Punch wants to have its cake and eat it too. (Although I must ask: Why would you hand me a piece of cake and then get mad when I eat it? Isn’t cake there to be eaten?) The sexy girls are both damsels in distress and avenging angels. Sucker Punch doesn’t entirely work but its gloomy grandiosity is appropriate to its subject matter. The film even approaches profundity at times, especially in the narrator shift in its final sequence. It turns out Sucker Punch is not Babydoll’s story after all. The story starts with Babydoll, but it ends with Sweetpea. It was Sweetpea’s story all along. Just like The Gold Diggers of 1933 is not about Trixie and Carol and Polly. It’s not about the rigors of putting on a Broadway show. It’s about those “forgotten men,” clamoring right outside the door.

Few filmmakers have made films as thematically rich as those from writers/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the 1940s. From 1943 to 1949, Powell and Pressburger, better known as the Archers, made seven superlative films that leapfrog genres with heedless abandon, from wartime epic to fantastical romance to psychosexual thriller to ballet drama. Thanks largely to cinephilic champions such as Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who married Powell in 1984), as well as home-media ventures like The Criterion Collection, the Archers’ films have received a vital and necessary second life.

While the Archers’ 1940s-era septet have recognizable throughlines as well as a reliable stable of performers, three of those films are cut from the same cloth, despite telling radically different stories with varying tones. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death all take place, at least in part, during World War II, and all three films depict a nation at war, as much with other countries as with itself. When we think of British culture, we think of the stiff-upper-lip mentality depicted in popular culture for decades, typified by how Brits acted and reacted in World War II. But the Archers, in this wartime trio, debated the validity of fighting a war with that old-fashioned mentality, offering up films designed to be propagandistic enough to be approved for release but that also asked what it meant to be British in seemingly perpetual wartime.

* * *

“But war starts at midnight!” – Clive Wynne-Candy

“Oh, yes, you say war starts at midnight. How do you know the enemy says so too?” – Spud Wilson

The nuance of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was likely always going to make it a sore spot for the British government. Colonel Blimp was not original to The Archers; he was a comic-strip character created by David Low in the 1930s, meant to skewer puffed-up elder statesmen of the British military. The stereotype of a fatheaded, pompous fool had pervaded the national consciousness so much that Winston Churchill feared the Archers’ adaptation would revive the public’s critical perception of the military when support was needed the most. But while the title invokes Colonel Blimp, the lead character is never referred to as Blimp, and is much less foolish than he may seem when initially seen attacking a young British soldier in a Turkish bath. Powell and Pressburger used the character and the staid, fusty old notions of British militarism as a jumping-off point for a detailed, poignant character study.

Set over four decades, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp begins near its finale, as Great Britain struggles to gain a foothold over the Nazis. We first see our Colonel Blimp, the portly, bald, and mustachioed Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), beset upon by younger soldiers in the club where he now lives as part of a training exercise. Clive is infuriated because they’ve started hours earlier than planned; before the smug young soldier leading the charge can explain himself, the two get into a tussle that speaks to why Powell and Pressburger wanted to tell this story. In the production of their previous film, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, the directors removed a scene where an elderly character tells a younger one, “You don’t know what it’s like to be old.” (The idea that this could serve as the thematic backbone to an entire feature was provided by the Archers’ then-editor, David Lean.) Clive’s rage at being taken off-guard leads him to thrash young Spud Wilson and teach him a lesson: “You laugh at my big belly, but you don’t know how I got it! You laugh at my mustache, but you don’t know why I grew it!”

And so, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp flashes back 40 years, a rare instance where a movie indulging in the now-hoary in medias res technique pays dramatic dividends. The rest of the film focuses on three points in the life of the man known first as Clive Candy: his time in the Boer War, the devastating World War I, and his twilight years of service as World War II ramps up. For a war film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp offers exceedingly little bloodshed. Powell and Pressburger’s film examines how such gruesome action informs men like Clive away from the battlefield, instead of depicting that action in full. Each section of Blimp shows how his noble efforts make him hardened and intractable over time, even against the tide of a truly tyrannical force. At first, Clive’s militaristic mantra is honorable: “Right is might.” But as the film reaches its third hour, he learns that his theory, one embodied by his nation, has been so cruelly disproven by the Nazi scourge that he and Britain must change their ways.  

In the earliest section, Clive steps to the aid of Edith Hunter (a young Deborah Kerr), a British governess in Berlin who’s concerned about a German soldier spreading anti-British lies regarding their treatment of South African women and children in the Boer War. In so doing, and after insulting high-ranking German officers, Clive must duel with a German soldier chosen by lot, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Watching a Brit face off with a German soldier might’ve felt appropriate, at least to the watchful eye of the British government. But Powell and Pressburger shrewdly show us the build-up to the duel itself, not the actual fight; instead, we see the aftermath, as Clive and Theo both convalesce in the same hospital, become close friends, and fall in love with Edith. Only Theo is lucky enough to win her heart; though Edith has as much love in her heart for Clive as for Theo, Clive only grasps his feelings once she’s left his life.

Portraying Theo, the film’s major German character, as surprisingly decent is one significant way in which the Archers brought nuance to what might have been another propagandistic WWII-era film. His innate humanity becomes heartbreaking as the film progresses. In the second section, Theo is a prisoner of war who’s initially too proud to admit his previous connection to Clive, before they reunite briefly. In the final section, Theo is older and much wiser than his friend, yet no luckier. He’s seen in a British immigration office, attempting to leave Germany on his own: his two sons have become Nazis and Edith has passed away. (“None of my sons came to her funeral. Heil Hitler,” Theo says grimly.) Theo then explains what drew him back to the UK, in a measured yet passionate soliloquy. No matter how many faults Theo sees in the Brits—after he reconnects with Clive post-WWI, Theo tries to point out that regular citizens “can’t be adjusted from war to peace as easily as you”—it is still a far kinder place to live than Germany. That the film’s most impassioned speech, expressing fondness for the British way of life, comes from a German is one of its many welcome surprises.

The film’s most haunting twist revolves around the women in Clive’s life. When Edith joins Theo in Germany, Clive is so shaped by her memory that when he settles down and marries the charming Barbara Wynne, she just so happens to look like Edith’s twin. Barbara, like Edith, passes away before World War II begins, but though Clive has aged, he hasn’t changed; his driver, Angela “Johnny” Cannon, looks just like Barbara and Edith, to the point where he introduces Johnny to Theo, fully aware that both men spot the similarity. Kerr, thus, is playing three strong-willed women, all of whom feel like perfect fits with the men of the film.

Clive, like his country, stays firmly and proudly rooted in the past, much to his detriment. When Theo, as an older man, reasons with Clive about how his way of waging war is outdated, it falls on deaf ears despite being a darkly accurate portrait of how WWII could have been lost: “If you let yourself be defeated by them just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won’t be any methods but Nazi methods.” Only after Spud Wilson’s gambit to throw oldsters like Clive off their game in the training exercise does Clive begrudgingly realize that time has passed him by. The old-fashioned sportsmanship of battle could no longer apply for the Clive Candys of the world; at least this one realized it.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ends wistfully, as Clive surveys the literal waterlogged wreckage of his life, having lost his house in the Blitz. He, Theo, and Johnny stand by the debris, and he recalls Barbara’s long-ago declaration: “You’ll stay just as you are till the floods come.” As he looks at where his house once lay, he says to himself, “Now here is the lake and I still haven’t changed.” Livesey, one of the very best actors to work with the Archers, imbues that line with a fine blend of pride and heartache, as he does with the salute he gives to the passing, much younger army of his native land. This elder statesman isn’t quite Colonel Blimp, only grasping Theo’s warnings about the Nazis after it’s too late, but he can see complexities of his life where others might not.

It took The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, like the other films explored here, years to fully get its due in the U.S. While Churchill didn’t bar Blimp from release in the United Kingdom, he enforced an export ban on the feature because he saw it as a less-than-helpful presentation of the military at such a dire period. (Or, as some have wondered, he may well have seen the older Clive Candy as a critique of him. Of course, Churchill reportedly never saw this film, because that would have been too challenging.) A shortened version was released in U.S. theaters in 1945, cutting out the flashback structure. The truncated TV version, which runs just 90 minutes—the original is 163 minutes— was still able to excite a young Scorsese, who helped fund a restoration in 2013 for this classic.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was, perhaps, doomed for failure; its treatment of people perceived as the enemy could gain resonance only with distance from WWII. The British War Office and Churchill stated their antipathy to the production even before it began filming, refusing the Archers’ request to release Laurence Olivier from service to star as Candy. (Livesey, to note, is wonderful in the film, so the Archers’ loss is our gain.) But Clive Candy was able to weather attacks, and so too was Blimp, the beginning of a seven-year period where the Archers upended expectations, strove to break cinematic ground, and stayed true to their artistic principles. Here is the lake, and still, this movie hasn’t changed. It only grows with age.

* * *

“It’s a great thing to sit back in an armchair and watch the world go by in front of you.” – Sgt. Bob Johnson

“The drawback is…that people may get used to looking at life from the sitting position.” – Thomas Colpeper

Fourteen months after The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Powell and Pressburger released another film set during World War II, which presented both the natural wonder and beauty of England while calmly displaying the ways in which the war had devastated some of its history. A Canterbury Tale wasn’t a hit with critics or audiences in the late summer of 1944; by the time it was released in the United States, the year was 1949, and a movie about three young strangers who journey towards Canterbury Cathedral in the waning months of World War II needed new, American-focused framing scenes to entice audiences.

Over 70 years after its initial release, what can we make of A Canterbury Tale? The allure of this low-key drama is, like its setting, ineffable and mysterious. The three leads, waylaid in the small English town of Chillingbourne while they wait for another train to Canterbury, ostensibly try to solve a mystery whose solution isn’t that mysterious. Some aspects of this film—whose three protagonists were all newcomers—feel less like drama and more like the Archers trying to make UK citizens turn away from the dark days of World War II and remind them of their land’s own beauty. From the vantage point of the 21st century, A Canterbury Tale is an utterly fascinating and serene look at how small towns tried to maintain a community-wide calm in the midst of terror.

Bob Johnson (Sgt. John Sweet) is an American soldier on his way to Canterbury Cathedral to meet a fellow Yank and do right by his mother back home in Three Sisters Falls, Oregon. Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) is a British soldier who seems outwardly as arrogant as Blimp’s Spud Wilson, even though his true passion is playing the organ. While he plays it at cinemas back home, he’d rather play the kind of organ in the handsomely appointed Canterbury Cathedral. Alison Smith (Sheila Sim) has been conscripted into the Women’s Land Army; assigned to a farm in Chillingbourne, she has personal memories from her time near Canterbury that she can’t help but unearth. These strangers are brought together one dark Friday night by happenstance: Bob misheard the station stop and got off early, but he and Peter end up helping Alison after she’s beset upon by a mysterious figure who puts, of all things, glue in her hair. Strangest of all, this isn’t the first time a young woman was attacked by “the glue man” in Chillingbourne.

In a more predictable film, this inciting incident would lead our trio down some dark paths in Chillingbourne, a name that portends something terrifying. But while there’s an unquestionably disturbing subtext to a man placing “sticky stuff,” as Alison describes it, in young women’s hair, there’s little in the way of conventional twists in A Canterbury Tale. When our heroes meet Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman), the magistrate of Chillingbourne who’s coincidentally the farmer to whom Alison has been assigned, it’s immediately obvious that he’s the glue man. Our heroes use the summer weekend, as they wait for the next train to Canterbury, to build up evidence, but as the weekend progresses, Bob and Alison (and eventually Peter) lose interest in solving the case as they fall in love with the British countryside.

Unlike Blimp, A Canterbury Tale has an ensemble of disparate characters who mostly have never seen serious battle. So many of them are average people conscripted into action, trying not to admit how terrified they feel. A Canterbury Tale features no bloodshed, but Powell and Pressburger stuck to the notion of making the film feel like a document of regular civilians by casting few recognizable actors. Portman worked with the Archers on the earlier film 49th Parallel and was, at the time, this film’s most well-known actor. Sweet, on the other end of the spectrum, was the least well-known; this was his first and only role in a film.

Recently, much was made about how Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris, in which three young men who foiled a real-life attack, feature those three men playing themselves. When Powell and Pressburger cast their American character, they didn’t change his name to match the actor’s, but they might as well have: John Sweet was an Army Sergeant at the time, and his first-time performing style is always evident. Unlike the performances in The 15:17 to Paris, however, Sweet’s work is oddly charming. Watching him interact with the ensemble allows for the understandable awkwardness of his performance to take on a double meaning; Sweet is the outsider as much because he’s untrained as because he’s American. Bob Johnson is incurably curious and inquisitive, having so little awareness of British traditions, making his languorous journey through Chillingbourne all the more compelling.

By the close of A Canterbury Tale, all three of our heroes receive a blessing in the style of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For Bob, it’s a revival of a romance he presumes is finished. His paramour, who he figured had moved on, has instead joined the Women’s Army Corps in Australia and has responded to the letters he thought had been ignored. Even before that, the people Bob meets in Chillingbourne, from the boys playing soldier to the local mechanics and a fellow military man from Seven Sisters in England, serve as a kind of blessing. When we first meet Bob, he’s all too happy to get his visit to Canterbury out of the way; before the movie ends, he’s taken to running down the sloping hills of Chillingbourne with his new friends, an overgrown boy at play. Stopping in Chillingbourne brings him joy even before his love life is given a new chance.

Alison, too, becomes closer to nature as she explores Chillingbourne. Of all people, she finds herself associating with Colpeper, even after she’s correct in presuming that he’s the culprit. Her blessing arises from memories she has of spending a summer outside Chillingbourne in a caravan with her fiancé, now presumed dead. But before she can receive the happy news that her fiancé is alive and well, she has to almost commune with the Earth to try and move on. By the second half, Alison is so in touch with nature that she hears the sounds of music and voices in the hills, akin to the centuries-old pilgrims Chaucer wrote about.

Alison’s connection is validated and shared by Colpeper, with whom she’s convening in those same hills Bob runs down. Even after Alison confirms Colpeper’s nighttime habits, she admits, “I was very mistaken about you.” Their connection is more emotional than anything else; Colpeper tells her that hearing voices as she does only works “when you believe strongly in something.” Colpeper’s strong belief in respecting Britain’s history is how he became the glue man. After his historical lectures were met with boredom and few attendees, he made it so British soldiers had little choice but to listen about their homeland’s history. By giving the soldiers a bad name (other townspeople, including the young women, presume one of them is the glue man), Colpeper assumed he could make a small encouragement to the British military to learn about the land it defended. As he explains to Peter on the train to Canterbury, “There’s no sin in being a savage, but a missionary who doesn’t try to do his duty is a bad missionary.”

Though Portman’s enigmatic performance turns Colpeper frosty even here, the magistrate receives a blessing from an unlikely source: Peter. Though Peter is the most gung-ho of the three young people to find the glue man, he chooses not to give Colpeper away to the authorities after he receives his blessing: the chance to play the Canterbury Cathedral organ. But Peter’s decision to let Colpeper walk is portended in one of the wonderful flourishes thrown in by the Archers in the film’s lush black-and-white cinematography. While on the train to Canterbury, Peter scoffs in response to the magistrate asking him if he is an instrument of judgment and says, “I’ll believe that when I get a halo over my head.” Cue the train light creating a halo effect over him.

There is no action-heavy setpiece in A Canterbury Tale, which instead features plenty of images of the main characters taking in the beauty of Chillingbourne. Through Colpeper, we see how hard it is for regular people to both support the military in wartime and forgive soldiers their vices. Through Peter, we see how soldiers didn’t quite grasp that their presence in small towns threw other people’s lives into upheaval. You could argue that very little happens to the characters in A Canterbury Tale; all that does happen is that Powell and Pressburger let the audience watch these people’s unremarkable yet compelling lives, and that they each secretly want to find some purpose when they arrive in Canterbury. The heroes appreciate what it meant to be British in decades gone by, and reflect on how that impacts their actions in the present. A Canterbury Tale was a love letter to England, made as gorgeous by its rolling hills as by its people. Though it didn’t hit big originally, and additional footage featuring Bob reconnecting with his girlfriend (Kim Hunter, about whom more very shortly) didn’t help it translate in America, A Canterbury Tale is a truly entrancing story of how badly people needed their unique burdens eased in such a horrific time of history.

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“This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” – Narrator

It’s hard to decide which is the best Archers film. Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, perhaps their most broadly appreciated films in America, are remarkable leaps forward for Technicolor cinematography, while showcasing incredible performances, breathtaking set designs, and more. They are gorgeous films, featuring some of the most jaw-dropping images in the Archers’ filmography. But the film released the year before, suggesting the possibilities of what the Archers would do next, is just a touch greater. It is a film that was well-received initially, despite receiving a new title for its U.S. release; a film that’s only getting its first Region 1 Blu-ray release this summer although it offers some of the richest, most colorful images in Three-Strip Technicolor; a film that’s influenced everything from The Simpsons to Harry Potter. It is A Matter of Life and Death.

What if someone was supposed to die, but got misplaced? What if that person, with their extra time, fell in love before they were found by their bringer of death? This, in effect, is the concept of A Matter of Life and Death, in which Peter Carter (David Niven), a cheerful RAF pilot, is meant to die when he escapes his damaged plane without a parachute. Before Peter jumps, he contacts June, a winsome young American radio operator (Hunter), to share what he presumes are his last thoughts in the strangest Meet Cute ever. Peter jumps from quoting Walter Raleigh to brazenly declaring, “I love you, June. You’re life, and I’m leaving you.” But once Peter exits the plane, the damnedest thing happens: he wakes up on the beaches of England very much alive, after which he meets June in person, officially starting their relationship.

The whimsy of A Matter of Life and Death is clarified when we learn why Peter was apparently able to cheat death: his French conductor (Marius Goring, who co-stars in The Red Shoes) couldn’t locate Peter in the thick English fog. Peter is dismayed to learn that his permanent eternal presence is requested in the Other World, taking him away from June. She, of course, is concerned that her new boyfriend might be going mad; kindly local doctor Frank Reeves (Livesey again) believes Peter might be suffering from a brain injury. The perpetually unanswered question is just that: is Peter hallucinating the Other World because his mind is going, or is he really at death’s stairway?

Powell and Pressburger don’t answer the question, providing just enough medical details, down to the smell Peter notices when he speaks to his Conductor, that it might just be a mental malady. (I submit that Peter isn’t hallucinating the Other World because the film never answers one question: how the hell did he survive that fall from the plane?) The closing moments of the film suggest that either option is possible, when it’s revealed that the judge of the Other World’s court of appeals and the surgeon operating on Peter are played by the same actor.

But the mystery of Peter’s circumstances is not what makes A Matter of Life and Death so special. This is one of the most ambitious films the Archers ever made. It is a buoyant, bursting-with-emotion romance between two star-crossed lovers whose connection is straight out of a fairy tale. It is a film designed to help bridge divides between the British and the Americans in the immediate aftermath of World War II. (The story begins just six days before the European section of WWII concluded.) And it is, above all else by the finale, meant as a rousing and spirited defense of the British people. When the Other World allows Peter to appeal his case, he chooses the firm, well-spoken Reeves—who dies tragically in a motorcycle accident before Peter’s surgery—to plead Peter’s case, passionately arguing in favor of his client’s basic humanity.

In these spectral, spiritual moments, Reeves goes head-to-head with Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), the first American felled by a British bullet in the Revolutionary War, in arguing for Peter’s clemency. But it becomes clear that Reeves and Farlan are not arguing over Peter’s right to live longer than originally planned: they are debating what it means to be British and to be American. Farlan doesn’t think much of the romance between Peter and June, seeing it as another case of two people ruining relationships back home because they’re thrown into unexpected circumstances abroad: “Men and women thousands of miles away from the love they left behind. Minute sparks, instead of scorching flames.”

This is the Archers’ irreverent way of presenting the British and American states of mind post-WWII. It’s also a sign of their empathy as filmmakers: when Reeves argues that the current jury—all men from different countries around the world impacted by England’s imperialist rule at varying points of history—is unfairly biased, he asks for six American citizens. The reveal is powerful in 2018 as much as it may have been in 1946: the six American citizens are all immigrants, French to African to Irish. There is no one type of American citizen, as there is no one type of British citizen: this film is a dissertation on what it is to be human.

Visually, A Matter of Life and Death is unparalleled in the Archers’ work; the cinematography shifts from Technicolor (in the real world) to black-and-white (in the Other World), and the design of the Other World creates a series of gasp-inducing images. There is the impossibly wide shot of the attendees of Peter’s appeal, in a vast auditorium that reveals itself to be the size of an entire galaxy; there is the design of the literal stairway to heaven (hence its American title, Stairway to Heaven), which seems appropriately infinite without being terrifying; there is the moment when Peter’s fellow RAF pilot, waiting for him in the Other World, peers down to the vast center where files on all people from Earth are kept, and we see his silhouette from far above. The sense of scope and scale in moments like these should be teachable moments for anyone crafting some big-budget spectacle; this film’s moments of wonder were accomplished with a meager budget.

The grandness of A Matter of Life and Death—a movie that begins with the camera panning through the vast universe and closes with lovers reuniting happily—is coupled by its creators’ aims, to emphasize the humanity in people of different creeds and cultures. Peter Carter seems almost carefree in his opening scene, throwing slang left and right to the woman who he’ll fall for even as he expects to die. By the end, Peter and June are united by what Reeves deems the most powerful force on Earth: love. It’s a declaration that manages to be corny and life-affirming at the same time, much in the same way as Powell and Pressburger attempt to emphasize the universal qualities of mankind throughout the spiritual-court climax. In this film, as in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Canterbury Tale, to be British is to be human.

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Unlike some of their British cohorts, such as David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock, most of the Archers’ films didn’t immediately hit big in America. Powell’s 1960 horror film Peeping Tom didn’t exactly end his career (he kept making films after that disturbing effort), but it garnered fiercely negative criticism. Over the last couple of decades, the Archers’ films have received well-deserved revivals. Last year, A Matter of Life and Death received a 4K restoration overseen by Scorsese and Schoonmaker, which is translating to the film soon receiving a Region 1 Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. (It is painfully overdue.) Before that, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and the operatic The Tales of Hoffman both received restorations, hopefully introducing more people to the wonder of these filmmakers.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale (which also deserves the Blu-ray treatment), and A Matter of Life and Death are the product of fertile creative minds who used the backdrop of World War II to explore vastly different worlds that all happen to exist in Great Britain. This trio runs the gamut of genres and emotions, all while showcasing the kind of soldiers who protected the United Kingdom throughout the first half of the 20th century. The raffish romantic lead of A Matter of Life and Death could easily have been the same kind of soldier to surprise the elderly Clive Candy in the opening of Blimp, or he could have just as easily stumbled across Chillingbourne’s glue man. He could have even been the young Clive Candy. These characters are distinct enough to exist within their own stories as they are to represent attitudes and personalities across all of the Archers’ films. These films encompass a vast universe, one that offers new wonders to cinephiles. Just as the pilgrims came to Canterbury for blessings, so too do true cinephiles receive blessings when they make the pilgrimage to watch Powell and Pressburger’s films.

“Experimenting with film is exciting to me. It feels like it has purpose.”
-Kate Bush, Egos and Icons, 1993

Kate Bush has always been more than your average musical artist. It’s not ordinary to have a chart-topping single when you’re 19-years-old, let alone a number-one hit about a classic literary text of all things. From the onset, she was more than hooks. She was a wizard of merging artistic interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could offer as an artist. Bush is never satisfied, but geniuses so rarely are, and when she masters one art form, she moves onto another with a ravenous appetite for perfection. In her art she has combined music, dance, mime, literature, fashion, and cinema into one. Her art is overwhelmingly dense and, from the beginning, few could truly reckon with her talent. Her music videos and concert television specials, in particular, are the purest distillation of her skills, and in cinematic terms, share a kinship with the likes of Maya Deren, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, and Terence Fisher.

In an interview with a British Television station from 1978, Bush recalled a moment in her childhood which would have a lasting effect on her psyche and her engagement with art. She was struck by an image from a television adaptation of Wuthering Heights. She caught the last five minutes of it and, without context, the image of a ghostly Kathy (the protagonist of the novel) haunted her. It was an extreme close-up, with Kathy begging for a window to be opened so she could enter her old house. From her earliest inclinations as an artist, she was first and foremost interested in visual imagery. Bush would also say in this interview that she wanted to write a song about the image that had stuck with her, but she needed to read the book first so she could “have context and get the tone right.” What would become of this collision course of image, text, and music is her first number one single in Britain, “Wuthering Heights.” The music video that followed would be one of the best the genre has ever seen.

There are numerous videos for the “Wuthering Heights” single, but two are widely recognized as the canonical examples in Bush’s oeuvre: The red dress video and the white dress video. Both present different formal takes on the single, and both are altogether dynamic in their connection to the song. The first of these, the white dress video, is shot on a sound stage with golden, harsh lighting, emanating from Bush’s body as she does her interpretive dance of the song. She makes big, swooping gestures with her limbs and has wide Clara Bow-like eyes. The image is split into two separate sections to create one fluid image—one a close-up so you can see her facial reactions to the song, the other with a wider scope so you can see the gestures she’s making to emphasize certain lyrics and passages of the song. Occasionally time-lapse photography is used to give off the illusion that Bush’s body is splitting into parts as she moves like Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” Cinematically, this video shares DNA with some of the earliest short films, more specifically the Serpentine Dance experiments that many different directors used to showcase how images could move in a certain way, but updated to aesthetics that would be more commonly used in early experimental music videos. These techniques were used to better capture singular movement and siren, ghostly feminine images, like in Bruce Conner’s groundbreaking video for “Breakaway,” starring Toni Basil. It would be startling in its own right if it were the only video for “Wuthering Heights,” but Kate Bush did one better when she donned the red dress.

The red dress video is overwhelming, shot in 4:3 and comprised almost entirely of medium shots to accentuate the visual language coming from the entirety of Bush’s body. Where the white dress video uses flashier techniques to evoke a very specific luminescent feeling, here the cinema is coming completely from her interpretive dance, as she uses the entirety of her body as sign language to emphasize the lyrical and tonal content of the song. The dance is note for note the same as the one in the white dress video, but the camera almost never pulls away here beyond the occasional close-up shot of Bush’s own facial acting, which in and of itself is also presenting the narrative of the song through her expressive, maximalist acting. The video evokes an almost mythic, idealized England of deep greens, where ghosts and ghouls roamed the land alongside the living. It’s a land of beautiful old gardens, and cottages (much like the one she grew up in), but the beauty is unnerved by a cerebral pull towards death, and in “Wuthering Heights,” that very nature is in the soul of the video. It’s set in an old forest, intensely green, but beset with fog, and Bush breaks the image with her stark, loud crimson dress. The wider framing allows us to see exactly what she’s wearing and how she moves. The medium lensing is reminiscent of many of Jacques Rivette’s high fashion pictures like Duelle, Noroit, and ironically enough his own adaptation of Wuthering Heights, where the outfit was always presented in full from head to toe and worked as an extension of the characters. In this video, the red dress is worn as a means of seduction. “Let me into your window,” Bush beckons, pulling her arms in closer. She’s speaking for the ghost of Kathy, begging to get out from the cold, but in addition to the narrative conceit of the song, it also works as a device of temptation for an introductory single.  “Let me into your window” could just as easily be “Let me into your lives,” and after “Wuthering Heights,” England and the rest of the world obliged.

The zenith of Kate Bush’s music video career was between 1978 and 1980, when her videos were barebones soundstage productions, for the most part, capitalizing on her ability to dance. “Them Heavy People” was the follow-up music video single to “Wuthering Heights,” and again the video didn’t disappoint. Shot in one continuous take on a sound stage, Bush is projected as a Humphrey Bogart figure if Humphrey Bogart were a pendulum of hips. Bush wears a tilted fedora with bravado, and pairs that up with a magenta knee-length skirt. She’s accompanied by two back-up dancers who follow her throughout the narrative of the song. Here, the music is about Bush learning to dance. (“They break down my body. I feel like it’s killing me. What a lovely feeling.”) Throughout, these two back-up dancers engage Bush in a dance of combat before getting Laurel and Hardy-esque or WWF by bashing chairs into each other before the song concludes. Bush’s greatest skill as a choreographer is interpreting the lyrical content of her own songs and painting a picture with her body on top of the image we are already seeing, creating a kaleidoscope effect in which different cinematic gestures are moving in and out of one another to create a full unified statement. Bush’s auteurism, if you will, is how she moves her body in a way to create a narrative surrounding the song she’s already written. With enough time, she would soon move behind the camera as well, but director Keith “Keef” MacMillian gave her earliest dance videos the space necessary to let Bush tell the story.

Her video for “Hammer Horror” works for the same reasons that “Wuthering Heights” and “Them Heavy People” do, but with the additional context of moving into genre cinema through dance. This time, her soundstage is shrouded in darkness with a blue spotlight on Bush and a masked man in an an all-black body suit that renders everything but his uncovered arms nearly invisible. Bush is wearing a low-cut, slinky, sequined black dress, complete with the vampiric cleavage of the eponymous studio vixen. It’s equal parts vampire film and a dance exhibition, as Bush taps into the recently bankrupt Hammer Pictures’ ethos of blood, boobs, and gothic chills. The man who dances with Kate acts as a pseudo-villain, always lurking behind Bush’s frail damsel-in-distress in the verse stanzas before she erupts into a violent demoness herself in the loud, plunging chords of the chorus. Bush rarely had time for hard rock, let alone heavy metal, but this could easily be described as such, with its horror-movie lyrical content and killer riffage. This video, like much of her earliest videography, is shot in one take, but here the camera moves with Bush to create movement alongside her body, making it one of the more visually ambitious works “Keef” did in collaboration with Bush. In particular, when the camera idles side to side in an extreme close-up on Bush’s back as she alludes to running, it gives off the illusion that we’re sprinting too. When Bush turns and the camera captures her cold, horrified glare, it moves us into the third act of the horror film where the dance centers entirely around choreography of her neck. The neck is an essential image in any horror film involving vampires, but it was practically one of the Ten Commandments in Hammer cinema. The closing image of the video is Bush dangling in the arms of her faceless villain, head tilted back, with her neck exposed completely. She’s faceless at this point, and the man takes his seemingly gigantic left arm and runs it down the nape of her neck slowly before clamping down completely. The camera zooms in a little and a perfect horror-movie image closes the video before cutting to black. It’s an image both sexual and horrific, the lifeblood of vampire cinema.

It was around this time, 1980, when Kate Bush started shifting her ideas of what she wanted to convey in music videos into something more traditionally narrative-based, with a less heavy reliance on interpretive dance and pantomime. In this period, she made “The Wedding List,” as an homage to the Truffaut film The Bride Wore Black, about a wronged bride who sought revenge for the desecration of her romantic life. Additionally, there was the Jean-Luc Godard-influenced experimental video for “Another Day,” with Peter Gabriel, which showed the unravelling of a couple by using frame-within-a-frame imagery to convey two separate stories of past and present simultaneously. Bush’s best video of this time period, however—and one that births a new period of her music video career—is her apocalyptic science fiction short for the song “Breathing.” The song saw a shift in Bush’s interests from her pop-inflected, piano-based dance music to something harder and altogether more experimental. It was a shift that would characterize her career for the next 30 years.

In the video for “Breathing,” Bush represents a fetus, begging and pleading to be given a chance to live and be with her mother in the outside world in the wake of nuclear annihilation. It’s a song that has deep ties to maternity, childbirth, and pregnancy, and when compared with the majority macho considerations of science fiction, it becomes something complex and unique within the genre. The video is matter-of-fact in its simplicity, but deeply moving in what the images convey about the lyrics. Once again, it’s mostly shot on a soundstage, where Bush is inside of a plastic orb, with deep amber lighting underneath her frail frame. She’s wearing a sheer outfit with white trim to portray the relative innocence of the fetus, and she spends the majority of the video either in the fetal position or pushing the orb back and forth to represent the kicking or pushing a mother may feel while pregnant. The words “Breathing my mother in” are a gently affecting and deeply harrowing sentiment when set against the context of nuclear war, and the video becomes a barrage of dissonant images. Our greatest possibility for love (giving someone life) and our greatest possible evil (the nuclear weapon) collide to create a pure statement on the human condition. When the mother’s water eventually breaks and Bush leaves the womb, what follows is a slow-motion dip into experimental imagery of one girl, bathed in shadow, peaking out from underneath a cloudy image reaching towards the reds, oranges, and bright lights of what she hopes will be a welcoming world. Only here she’s greeted with an atomic explosion that sinks into the earth in the shape of Kate Bush’s silhouette. This is a woman’s story of creation caught in the crossfire of what man creates and mourning the death of a world she knows will inevitably fall. It’s a complicated, resonant question for any time, but made even more evocative by the terror of a supposedly inevitable nuclear war between the United States and Russia in the 1980s. In terms of cinema, it’s probably the greatest exhibition of pregnancy and childbirth this side of Stan Brakhage’s “Window Water Baby Moving.”

In an interview for British Television series, Egos and Icons, Kate Bush stated that her music video for “Running Up that Hill” was her way of saying goodbye to the pantomimed, interpretative dance of her earlier music career in favor of dancing that was more serious and elegant. The choreography of the video would be a pure dance, stripped of theatricality, with its footing in a bolder narrative sophistication. For this video, she brought in choreographer Diane Grey to take the reigns in constructing a dance around the narrative of the song, about a woman who wishes her partner could see things through her eyes, because it would fix their problems. Bush’s work has always been heavily gendered in a feminine context, but there’s a deliberate decision here to present two bodies working in jarring competition with one another while being punctuated with bursts of synchronicity, as Bush and her male partner move in and out of one another’s grasp and bodies with a fluid grace. The dance is the most complicated and daring of her music video work, while still gravitating toward a narrative interest in reflecting the lyrics of the song. But what follows in all of its beautiful lifts, cradles, and slides is a dance of two people starkly different from one another finding occasional momentary symbiosis. It’s a melding of both the masculine and the feminine into one perfect image, only for it to slip away.

Bush’s work has always highlighted the female form, with real emphasis on her body as it relates to its present state in the world of the song. It’s reminiscent of the work of Maya Deren, whose work frequently foregrounded womanhood in the deep waters of experimental cinema. Deren’s “At Land” bears stark similarities to “Running Up that Hill” in this regard, where Deren’s body is more like a curving liquid at one with an elemental earth rather than in man’s creation. In the Deren short, the ocean moves in and out, which is a dance in and of itself, and the woman (played by Deren) enters into a chess game that’s representative of her own push-and-pull conflict with being a woman in a man’s world. Her body, ever present and always in frame, sometimes looking toward the sea as if the murky deep would offer a tranquility, and in Bush’s video, she reaches toward a sun, maybe even to God, to bring her closer to understanding the conflict within her own life. Fittingly, Deren’s short ends with her running up a hill.

Kate Bush continued to stray more and more towards cinema as she raced through the ‘80s and become close friends with Terry Gilliam, who introduced her to many people in the industry who helped her put together the funding needed to make her first feature, 1993’s 50-minute The Line, The Cross and the Curve. The film is a riff on The Red Shoes (she made an album of the same name), and even includes a thank you to Michael Powell. It’s a shaggy affair, with all of her eccentricities, strengths, and weaknesses laid bare. It’s most apt comparison point is probably Prince’s Graffiti Bridge in the sense that it is both the most Kate Bush a project could possibly be, full of quirks that are very take-it-or-leave-it depending on how big of a fan you are of the music. Bush’s most base filmic interests are Gilliam with a dash of Jean Cocteau and Twin Peaks-era David Lynch. Much of the visual imagery in the film is reminiscent of the Black Lodge, with an obsession over red curtains, flames and mirrors. The greatest weakness of the film is that it would obviously draw unfair comparisons to Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece and no film under any circumstances could live up to those lofty expectations. But that’s Kate Bush: She’ll aim for heaven even if it means her own hell. Nevertheless, The Line, The Cross and the Curve is not without some truly breathtaking moments, such as the callback to her earlier soundstage videos of the late 70s in the yo-yo’ing “Rubberband Girl.” In that segment, a man dances behind Bush, serving as her shadow, bobbing her back and forth to create a dance where Bush’s body personifies a rubber band. The title track features a breathtaking choreographed moment between her and the man who taught her to dance, Lindsay Kemp, while dazzling sequins splash all over the screen as Bush and Kemp dance around floating multi-colored fabrics. The sequence, set to “Moments of Pleasure” is the film’s absolute high point, with Bush merely twirling, as if wound up from her back like a music box ballerina. Throughout this sequence she’s covered in falling snow, but it looks more like bursting starlight and against all this black, she’s adorned in hellfire red, singing her heart out. It’s a startling image, one that takes its time and is deeply moving in its straight-forward theatricality. Bush considers the film a major disappointment, but underneath her own perfectionist tendencies, anything less than equaling Powell and Pressburger would have been a failure.

Kate Bush’s music video library is epochal, constantly rewarding in its zealous fusion of artistic forms, and her fundamental understanding that cinema, movement and dance are intertwined. When watching feature films, we tend to point out whenever a scene has great music accompanying it, whether it’s Claire Denis’ use of “The Rhythm of the Night” in the disco denouement of Beau Travail or the montage set to “Layla” in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but why are music videos so vastly ignored when we canonize movies? If there’s to be a music video canon, then it’s important to understand what makes a music video cinema in the first place. Through dance, rhythm, and movement, music videos truly find their identity in the lexicon of cinema, and with Kate Bush in particular, she immerses her entire body into that very idea. Stop Making Sense is widely considered the greatest concert film of all time, thanks in part to Jonathan Demme’s understanding of rhythm and how he captured the jittery quality of David Byrne’s dancing. If the same can be extended to the work of music videos, then the entire world of images bursting out of Bush’s body time and time again must be holy and it must be considered cinema.

For ten years now, I’ve nursed an oddly specific theory: Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is the most geographically accurate film about New York City, at least within the last 15 years. This is a strange thing to fixate on, not least because the film doesn’t come up much: It came out a decade ago, received generally fine reviews, and made $33 million (at least in part because it was riding the post-Juno/Superbad wave of Michael Cera’s newfound fame), but if it’s become a cult film, that’s one quiet cult. None of this is relevant to what’s valuable about the film: Nick & Norah’s primary task is, yes, to tell a linear teen romance narrative in the “one crazy night” subgenre. Its secondary imperative is to make sure that every time someone crosses a street or turns a car, the geography is accurate. That’s way more important to me, in part because it’s rarer than I’d like.

This is not the kind of thing that would have popped out at me before moving to New York. I grew up in Austin from 1993-2004, at a time when Texas was getting serious about introducing tax incentives to increase film production, but the movies shot in town and released while I was still growing up didn’t offer much in the way of lived, on-the-street experience. One of the first big productions to shoot in and around (definitely more the latter) Austin was 1998’s The Newton Boys. If memory serves, the film bricked nationwide but played there for a few months; it’s nice to see your city onscreen, a privilege many places don’t get, so people rolled out. But The Newton Boys is a period film, so there wasn’t much to latch onto recognition-wise, with the exception of a scene shot in the Paramount Theater (a 1915-built Art Deco theater, of the type you can find all over the country, where I spent far too many summers watching the building blocks of classic Hollywood cinema) and a few set-dressed street exteriors around it. There’s Office Space, of course, but the goal there was to present a vision of a generic any-city—and most of it takes place indoors, anyway. Some local excitement was mustered for Wing Commander (shot in Luxembourg, post in Austin) and hometown hero Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids; this isn’t the richest pool to draw upon. (Please don’t bring up Slacker, it’s too complicated to get into.)

I moved to New York in 2004. NYU unexpectedly met my financial scholarship needs, which was supposed to give me four years to transition into living in the city, which ended up happening. One of the first things I did after arriving was go see Thom Andersen’s 2003 doc Los Angeles Plays Itself, which I’d read a lot about but had not been able to access in Austin. Andersen’s nearly three-hour essay film on representations of Los Angeles on screen is an excellent, game-changing thing to watch in college, but perhaps what stuck with me most was the section in which Andersen (via narrator Encke King) bitches extensively about geographical inaccuracy: how distracting it is to watch a film shot in Los Angeles and see a character make a left turn that relocates them three miles away in a single cut. It’s not the kind of thing non-natives would be likely to notice, but once you’re on the hunt for it, it’s endlessly aggravating, as Andersen demonstrates in a montage of nonsensical examples. It was something I’d never thought about, and something that has subsequently been wildly distracting every time I watch a film shot where I live now.

It is, perhaps, sad that I know for a fact that there is no Dunkin’ Donuts in Times Square, but nonetheless there is one in Men in Black III, digitally inserted for product placement reasons. That’s doubly infuriating: Setting aside the cynicism of the motivation, it takes one of the most unbearable places in Manhattan and actually make it worse. And not to pick on Will Smith exclusively, but Collateral Beauty contains one of the most baffling subway errors I’ve seen. Smith and Helen Mirren are having a conversation on the street, approach the Broadway-Lafeyette station and take one of the four orange lines (the B/D/F/M—it doesn’t matter which if you’re only going one stop uptown, and I couldn’t tell) one stop, to West Fourth Street. They emerge from the subway car and step onto the right platform, keep talking, walk up the stairs onto the right street—and when they turn the corner, they’re back at Broadway-Lafayette. Not only is this wrong, it’s simply baffling; both locations were clearly visited, so why not stick the landing for one more shot? This isn’t just some kind of pedantic score-settling that should be noted on an IMDB goofs page; I live here, and it’s insulting.

Not Nick & Norah’s though. The film came out in October of 2008, the first fall after I graduated NYU, and I immediately noticed that the film is scrupulously accurate about the NYU Freshman Universe. Because NYU bought up so much property in the West Village and adjacent areas (one of the many reasons why they are widely despised by locals, which I wish I’d known before applying), any freshman living in the dorms on campus is most likely going to stay confined to a certain area: 2nd to 6th Ave., 14th St. to Houston. Nick & Norah’s is slightly more expansive than I remembered, starting a few streets south of Houston, at Arlene’s Grocery on Allen St., and roams all the way up to Avenue A. Still, with the exception of a few trips out of the area (to Penn Station, uptown at the end and to “Brooklyn Pool”—actually Williamsburg’s locally infamous Union Pool, which the protagonists rightly leave quickly), it’s all in the same pocket I thought it was, and every move from one location to another makes sense. Rewatching the film, I took extensive notes on every turn and walk and could map it out; it’s nearly flawless in that sense. (One exception I caught: a right turn onto 10th Ave from Ave. A. Cera and Kat Dennings argue as he drives, until he suddenly U-turns back into A out of frustration. Realistically, they’d be closer to Ave. C or so at that point. If that’s the only problem, we’re not doing bad—the IMDB goofs page notes another three, only one of which I registered and is indeed weird, but none of which strike me as unforgivable.)

I might not have clocked the accuracy quite so intently if it weren’t for where the movie stops for a few minutes: the Modern Gourmet, a bodega around the corner from my freshman year dorm, Brittany Hall. I know the space well; on a very limited budget, there were a lot of dinners cobbled together from the hot bar (discounted after 8 p.m.!), a mélange of heat-counter dumplings, sausage and peppers and pasta shells, a combo whose taste will never leave my mouth. This is where Norah’s rests for a key scene, and when Dennings comes back outside, the van where people are waiting for each other is parked on 10th St., right where it should be. That remains moving to me: A not-outstanding year of my life preserved in a succinct image that, plot-wise, has nothing to do with me.

If Nick & Norah’s is the most geographically accurate NYC movie, there must be a least accurate counterpart. For that, I’ll nominate They Came Together, David Wain’s exhaustive 2014 dismantling of (among other things) You’ve Got Mail. The geographical scrambling is by design and sometimes impossible to ignore: even if you’ve never been to New York, it’s hard not to notice the discrepancy when an exterior shot of The Strand—the sprawling new-and-used bookstore/clearinghouse that claims to stock eight miles’ worth of books—cuts to the interior of a tiny bookstore that definitely isn’t the Strand. It’s actually Community Bookstore, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope; one of the film’s incredibly specific jokes is that it theoretically takes place in the Upper West Side, but was blatantly shot in Brooklyn (in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, specifically). In most movies, geographic inaccuracy is the result of laziness, inattention, or just plain not caring; in They Came Together, that’s a whole visual joke that goes absolutely uncommented on. If you don’t live here, you might not notice; if you do, it’s impossible to unsee. The movie leans into the joke hard: the very first scene riffs on an old chestnut of these kinds of films, with the line “There is another character that was just as important as the two of us: New York City.” Heighten the contradictions.

If one film’s goal is explicitly to get geography right and the other’s is to derange it, what’s strange to me is which of the movies I now find more authentic in its portrayal of NYC. When I saw Nick & Norah’s upon initial release, I guessed that part of the reason it was shot in NYU-land is because director Peter Sollett went there as well. After rewatching it, I emailed him to ask about my ten-year-old hunch. “It sure was,” he wrote back. “After NYU I lived in the East Village for a decade, and my aim was to present the corner of New York that I love so dearly.” Accuracy was always the aim: “I know this is probably limited to people who live in Manhattan or have lived in Manhattan, but it always takes me out of the movie when someone takes a left on 14th Street onto [Houston] Street,” he noted in a 2008 interview. “It does suspend my suspension of disbelief […] and it didn’t seem necessary.” Wain’s goal was precisely to suspend that suspension: “We were commenting on how often NYC movies ignore obvious geographical realities that any New Yorker would notice,” he wrote in an email to me. “The entire movie is supposed to take place in the storybook version of the Upper West Side we associate with Woody Allen/Nora Ephron, etc., but was shot entirely in Brooklyn Heights/Cobble Hill. My favorite example of this was when we’re at the coffee shop in Brooklyn Heights outside the Clark St. subway station but we changed the [subway] sign to be the (non-existent) ‘Upper West Side’ station.”

I don’t doubt Sollett’s sincerity of intent or love for the area, but I’m guessing our experiences at, and relationship to, NYU are pretty different. It’s not worth getting into (at least not here) why I wasn’t the biggest fan of the school, but one thing I thought from the moment I entered the dorms was, “This is the only time in my life I will be able to afford to live in Manhattan.” I was correct: When I moved out of the dorms in 2007, I went out to Brooklyn and have been here ever since, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change any time in the near future. Nick & Norah’s is a movie that’s comfortable with privilege (Dennings’ character turns out to come from serious money), and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But Nick & Norah’s Manhattan was never going to be mine, and the final shot is a little unnerving: craning up over 8th Ave, outside Penn Station, with the camera and sun rising to optimistic music. The effect should be a real “I love New York” moment, but I can’t get over knowing that that block is anything but pleasant, and the shops whose signs we see (Chase, Fidelity Insurance, the mini-chain Europa Cafe, which is basically in the Pret category) speak to the increasingly homogenous nature of that area in particular and NYC in general.

If They Came Together’s New York is a construction that deliberately doesn’t work, in some ways it’s closer to my reality: people whose aspirational lifestyle is to live in Manhattan but can’t afford it (not that the Brooklyn neighborhoods the film was shot in are at all cheap, or even particularly “affordable,” insofar as that word even still has a discernible meaning in contemporary NYC). They Came Together is the present and future; Nick & Norah is my past, seen in a nicer light than I might personally cast on it. We are all lucky to be able to have a chance to see the place we live onscreen, and some of us are more often lucky than others; we’re luckiest of all when someone sweats the details.

In 2004, the same year that she won an Oscar for Monster, Charlize Theron achieved perhaps her greatest fame with the Dior television ad for J’Adore. A decade later, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road was instantly canonized as one of the best action films ever made and Theron’s anti-glamorous Imperator Furiosa became a feminist icon, but the J’Adore woman had already blazed the trail. Stalking down a Parisian corridor in a gorgeous evening gown, she took off her jewelry and her dress with determination, staring defiantly into the camera. The message: Diamonds are no best friend to a girl who wants to “feel what’s real.“ And it’s no surprise that throughout her career, Theron has worked to reach and reveal the authentic and independent woman beneath her top-model appearance.

Born in South Africa in 1975, Theron first aspired to become a dancer. After modeling in Europe, she moved to New York to learn ballet, until an injury made her reconsider. Aged 19, she went to Los Angeles to try acting, and in 1996, got her first speaking part in John Herzfeld’s Pulp Fiction rip-off 2 Days in the Valley. With her already-blond hair bleached out and her lean, tall body fitted into a spandex costume, she played a dangerously sexy woman in the neo-noir tradition. Showing off her naturally husky voice (and a very good American accent), Theron struts through Los Angeles like a true femme fatale. Her climactic catfight with Teri Hatcher is what people remember (and representative of the film’s tackiness), but this early role showed that Theron could play strong women—and was up for action.

That same year, Theron appeared alongside Tom Hanks in his directorial feature film debut That Thing You Do! as a Marilyn Monroe-esque girl of the 1960s, eye candy in a film about a sweet pop band. Theron’s looks were being transparently capitalized upon, yet being cast by an actor of Hanks’ caliber meant that her talent was being recognized too. “I thought: ‘If he thinks I am worth hiring, then maybe I’m going to be okay,’” she told IndieLondon in 2007.

As the increasingly tortured wife of a Florida lawyer recruited to New York in Taylor Hackford’s The Devil’s Advocate, Theron got to work with another icon in Al Pacino and demonstrate even more range despite a rather exploitative part. Theron’s Mary Ann is a committed and happy partner to Kevin (Keanu Reeves) but she isn’t superficial; his growing obsession with his job and his new boss, Pacino’s John Milton, leaves her feeling lonely and disillusioned. Theron plays Mary Ann realistically in a hellishly stylized thriller, and opposite two notoriously intense male actors who take up a lot of space with shouting and posturing, her sensitivity is welcome. It’s also a smartly physical performance, with Theron playing slyly on her looks. As the film goes on, Mary Ann transitions from her initial, ill-fitting stereotype of the curly blonde woman as a symbol of vice and danger (no doubt inspired by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction) to a brunette bob that distances the character—and the actress—from a banal bombshell image.

Theron’s appearance as a nameless “supermodel” in Celebrity in 1998 was therefore a detour in her search for great female roles, but this career choice, like that of so many talented actors until only a few months ago, can be explained by the fact that Celebrity was a Woody Allen film. Today, younger actors are distancing themselves from Allen, but for Theron, it was a step towards industry-wide respect. She inhabited her archetypal part with an authenticity derived from her background in modeling and made a typically exploitative Woody female part seem somewhat lived in.

As the decade came to a close, Theron bounced between thankless genre roles, opposite an animatronic gorilla in Mighty Joe Young (1998) and a body-snatched Johnny Depp in the Rosemary’s Baby-in-space thriller The Astronaut’s Wife (1998), before excelling in the ensemble of Lasse Hallström’s The Cider House Rules (1999), where she revealed her character’s interior dilemma more convincingly than co-stars Tobey Maguire or Michael Caine. Reindeer Games (2000) was John Frankenheimer’s last feature, and Theron has admitted to taking the part solely for the chance to work with the legendary director (rather than Ben Affleck), and parlayed her interest in auteurs into a collaboration the same year with an up-and-coming filmmaker.

The actress has said of James Gray that he was “one of the first directors, other than Taylor Hackford, who really fought for me […] it was an amazing experience to have somebody stand in your corner and say ‘she’s not too pretty to play the part. That’s bullshit, she’s an actress, let’s get past this obsession about what she physically looks like.” Theron’s emotional performance in Gray’s The Yards deepens what could have been a rather superficial and uninteresting character in this Godfather Part II-like story of widespread corruption, family ties, and impossible redemption. Her more down-to-earth style matches with her character, who, like in The Devil’s Advocate, cares little for the dreams of excessive wealth that the men around her pursue.

Theron was surrounded by male movie stars in the early 2000s in The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Italian Job (neither of which showed what she could do), but, showing tenacity and independence, she moved front and center with Monster, which she produced through her company Denver and Delilah Productions. (The business was named for her two dogs.) Director Patty Jenkins (more recently of Wonder Woman fame) convinced Theron to take the lead role of Aileen Wuornos, spurring a complete physical and behavioral transformation to portray the real-life prostitute-turned-serial-killer, who was executed for her crimes in 2002. With her hairline pulled back, her eyebrows bleached out and her statuesque body altered by a 30-pound weight gain, the former model is unrecognizable. She doesn’t try to make Wuornos likable, replicating the character’s oddly tortured behavior, full of ticks and aggressive movements.

Crucially, Theron doesn’t deny Wuornos her humanity either, and Jenkins’ script and direction allow for moments of vulnerability and tenderness between the “Monster” of the title and her friend-slash-partner Selbi (Christina Ricci), herself a fictionalized version of Wournos’ real-life girlfriend Tyria Moore. Theron recently talked to Bill Simmons on his Ringer podcast about the economic difficulties that the production faced, with the financier panicking two weeks into shooting when he saw Theron’s transformation. “You’re always walking that fine line of, ‘Is it a caricature? Am I going too far with it? Will people relate to this? Will people be able to watch this? Am I making a joke out of it?’,” she told Simmons. Theron won an Oscar, but by producing and starring in a serious, female-directed drama, she also confirmed her commitment to challenging, woman-centered cinema.

After Monster, Theron took the reins on another female-forward project: Niki Caro’s North Country (2005). Based on the true story of Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co.—the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit in the United States—the film sends Theron (who got her second Oscar nomination) to the mines of Minnesota as Josey Aimes, who has taken a job to escape her abusive husband and provide for their two young children. In this male-dominated environment, casual slights and violent abuses of female workers are constant; Aimes struggles to get her union to support her legal action, but she also has to face the difficulties of child-rearing. In one harrowing sequence, Josey succumbs to the pressure and screams at her children (a scene that reverberates even more in light of her later work in Tully).

Before stepping fully into the mother roles that Hollywood throws at women over 30, Theron tried to establish herself in the one big genre that she hadn’t yet truly explored: the action science-fiction film. Aeon Flux was a highly ambitious project: based on a popular 1990s animated TV series set in a post-apocalyptic future, the film was to be director Karyn Kusama’s attempt to finally reap the fruits of the acclaim that her debut Girlfight had received at Sundance in 2000. What started as an exciting challenge soon turned into a catastrophe, however, when a regime change at Paramount led to the project getting butchered by a new team of editors. "I got a call from one of my executives that was essentially like, ‘I really hated your version of the movie, but, believe it or not, I hate the new version even more,” Kusama told BuzzFeed. Theron herself is convincing as a skilled assassin trying to overthrow a totalitarian government, with her low voice and statuesque figure making her a great action heroine, but the film is distractingly bad around her. The fight sequences lack coherence and fail to capitalize on Theron’s athleticism.

The witty Fox sitcom Arrested Development was an opportunity for Theron to step away from the risky world of Hollywood blockbusters while still challenging herself as an actress. As the ‘Mentally Retarded Woman’ Rita, Theron got to lean on her comedic talent with a role that played on her looks and deconstructed her movie star prestige. During those five episodes, Michael (Jason Bateman) suspected Rita to be a British spy, thus poking fun at both Theron’s failed action venture in Aeon Flux and her foreign origins in the show’s typically absurdist way. Her role in the Will Smith vehicle Hancock in 2008 also saw her in semi-ironic mode, appearing as an “immortal” disguised as a regular human being whose past catches up with her. Theron’s hyped high-flying fight with Smith, however, was mostly CGI tricks that didn’t ask much in the way of physical prowess from either star, and the film didn’t live up to its grown-up comic-book promise.  

Jason Reitman’s Young Adult (2011) was Theron’s best part in almost a decade. In this realistic, darkly humorous drama, she plays another kind of Monster, as well as a woman struggling with a sort of Arrested Development. Her Mavis is a 37-year-old divorced ghostwriter of YA novels struggling to finish the last volume in her already terminated series. When her high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson) makes contact, Mavis gets it in her head that the solution to all her problems is to reunite with Buddy, and heads back to their small Minnesota hometown to break apart his young family. Mavis is a lonely alcoholic, and Theron, once again, goes through a physical transformation: With great subtlety, she looks like a disheveled drunk who’s trying to appear healthy and level-headed. Mavis seems out of place and uncomfortable in classy clothes, and at ease in her teen-like leather jacket when drinking too much at the bar as in her high school days. Again, Theron excels at playing nasty: Mavis’s depression and refusal to move on from a difficult past make her figuratively ugly, yet Diablo Cody’s script keeps her relatable. (Behind-the-scenes footage on the film’s DVD release reveals how Theron remains in the dark headspace of her character between takes and contributes ideas, which matches with Reitman’s easygoing approach to filmmaking.) Theron’s spontaneity, even when playing an inebriated and angry woman, is impressive and makes Mavis touching even through her repulsiveness.

Since Young Adult, Theron has been on a blockbuster mission, aiming in particular at action films where her innate confidence and taste for villains or complicated heroes could find an outlet. With Aeon Flux far behind her, she has been able to dive into the franchise model incrementally. Prometheus (2012) was a disappointing installment in the Alien series, yet it allowed her to demonstrate a villainous persona, which flowered in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). The fairy tale epic was like a continuation of Mavis’ paranoid legacy, as Theron’s Evil Queen tries to eat Snow White’s heart to live and rule forever young.

But the film that immediately made Theron an icon of action cinema was George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. In a familiarly Miller-esque world where water has become rare and turned the earth into a dangerous wasteland, her Imperator Furiosa is a strong, determined truck driver, missing one arm but athletic nonetheless, and precise with a rifle. Furiosa is also a political rebel, going rogue against tyrannical leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), stealing his five wives and taking them to her homeland the Green Place—along with a helpful but bemused drifter, Max (Tom Hardy, the film’s namesake but not its main character). Theron again commits to the part physically, her head shaved and her body lean and powerful, and her naturalistic acting style gets to shine through as Furiosa is a woman of few words. It is through her gestures, and especially in her eyes, sparkling blue below her black painted forehead, that the actress translates Furiosa’s tenacity, hopefulness, and fear. That Theron should be a warrior leading a group of women to their salvation only makes sense, devoted as she has been throughout her career to dismantling gendered expectations.

Theron showed up in the The Fate of the Furious (sadly not the Fate of the Fu-riosa) in 2017, adding another franchise and another villainess to her list. She then got her own franchise with Atomic Blonde, in which she got the chance, twelve years after Arrested Development, to be a real MI6 agent. Theron’s Lorraine Broughton is sent to Berlin just before the Wall is torn down in 1989 to investigate the assassination of a fellow agent by a Russian spy, and carnage ensues. Co-produced by Theron herself, the film aims to do right everything that Aeon Flux did wrong, with precisely choreographed action by director David Leitch, coming off his uncredited work on the transcendent John Wick (2014). Lorraine suffers vicious blows and is badly bruised, following in the footsteps of Theron’s damaged characters, but unlike these other heroines, she’s getting hurt for a supposedly good cause rather than due to some past trauma. Atomic Blonde could have relied on Theron’s sense of humor a little more, but as a piece of badass action filmmaking, it does a remarkable job of presenting a strong but not invincible female heroine, with fighting aptitude and style to rival James Bond or Ethan Hunt. Naturally, a sequel is in the works.

This year, Tully reunited Theron with Reitman and Cody, and demonstrated how smaller features and more dramatic roles remain important for the actress. The troubled woman this time is Marlo, a wife and mother exhausted by her daily tasks. After an unplanned third child is born, Marlo struggles more than she can bear and finally follows her brother’s suggestion to hire a night nanny (the titular Tully, played by Mackenzie Davis). As in Young Adult, Theron is unglamourous and relatable as a mother stretched too thin to really enjoy her kids or her husband, who walk on eggshells around her. Her ticking-bomb behavior makes for deeply uncomfortable scenes, but the payoff of eventually seeing her smile thanks to Tully’s compassion is rewarding. Davis, herself a very spontaneous performer, has great chemistry with Theron, which almost makes the rather offensive ending forgivable.

Whatever your opinion on Tully itself, Theron, now 42-years-old, is undeniably spectacular as Marlo. No other actress today devotes herself to such difficult and ugly roles on a regular basis, building a filmography of rich—if not likable—characters despite Hollywood’s continued focusing on female stars as ideals of beauty. Simultaneously, Theron is also making headway into the male dominated genre of action films, leading her own franchise and appearing in blockbusters to play villains instead of the damsels in distress she portrayed in her early days. Her determination to play complex and often nasty characters hopefully will keep her career going for many more years, but perhaps her influence on Hollywood will also mean that great roles for women above thirty will multiply and new opportunities will open up for more talented actresses to honor Theron’s ability to be both the diamond and the rough. Personally, c’est ça que j’adore.

(The following essay is excerpt from Jason’s new book, It’s Okay With Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye.)

The first thing John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) does in Gordon Parks’ Shaft, after emerging from a Times Square subway station below the grindhouse movie theaters that would eventually and enthusiastically screen his adventures, is walk into New York City traffic (Shaft can’t be stopped, even by Eighth Avenue) and flip off the driver who gets too close to him. Meet your new action hero, Middle America; here is his message to you.

Shaft came early in the so-called “blaxpoitation” movement—a period, running roughly from 1970 to 1975, that saw an explosion of films made for, about, and often by African-Americans. This was an underserved audience; with the exception of independent “race picture” makers like Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, their stories simply weren’t told onscreen, and they certainly weren’t told by mainstream studio films, which consigned black performers to subservient roles (or worse). The winds started to shift in the 1960s, when Sidney Poitier became a bankable name and Oscar-winning star, but he was the exception to the rule. It wasn’t until football star-turned-actor Jim Brown leveraged his supporting turn in the 1967 smash The Dirty Dozen into bona fide action hero status that this untapped swath of moviegoers, hungry for entertainment and representation, began to make itself known.

1970 saw the release of two very big (and very different) hits: Ossie Davis’ high-spirited crime comedy Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Melvin Van Peebles’ provocative, X-rated (“by an all-white jury!” boasted the ads) Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Peebles’ film was, essentially, the black Easy Rider, a rough-edged road movie with a decidedly European sensibility that grossed something like $15 million on a $150K budget, a return on investment so huge, the (flailing) studios couldn’t help but take notice.

Shaft was next down the chute. Adapted by Ernest Tidyman—who also wrote that year’s Best Picture winner The French Connection—from his 1970 novel, the film was helmed by Gordon Parks, the influential photographer who’d made his directorial debut in 1969 with the autobiographical The Learning Tree. MGM gave him a modest $1 million budget; model-turned-actor Roundtree was paid a mere $13,500 to play the title role. (Isaac Hayes was among the actors who auditioned, and though Parks passed on his acting, he hired Hayes to compose and perform the picture’s iconic funk score.)

“Shaft essentially was a standard white detective tale enlivened by a black sensibility,” wrote Donald Bogle, in his essential Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks. “As Roundtree’s John Shaft—mellow but assertive and unintimidated by whites—bopped through those hot mean streets dressed in his cool leather, he looked to black audiences like a brother they had all seen many times but never on screen.” He’s right on both scores. Shaft, who is smirkingly called a “black Spade detective,” is embroiled in a commonplace private eye narrative, engaged by a lying client (uptown gangster Bumpy Jonas, smoothly played by Moses Gunn) to find a missing girl—in this case, the client’s daughter. Shaft is a snappy dresser and sharp shooter; he uses the neighborhood bar as his second office.

But we’ve never seen a private eye who looks like this. Shaft leaves the shirts and ties to the cops and gangsters; he wears turtlenecks with his suits, along with that amazing leather coat. In the documentary Baadasssss Cinema, blaxploitation acolyte Quentin Tarantino is critical of the lack of action in Shaft’s opening credit sequence (“I’m semi-frustrated that [the theme] wasn’t utilized better,” he explains. “If I had the theme to Shaft to open up my movie, I’d open my damn movie”), but he’s underestimating the visual jolt of merely showing a man like Shaft strutting the streets of New York, and gazing upon him as he stakes his claim.

There’s something undeniably sensual about that gaze. Shaft was among the first major motion pictures to feature a black man of sexual potency—with the phallic overtones embedded right in his surname, and thus in the film’s title. He gets a full-on sex scene with his steady lady early in the film; later on, he shares a steamy shower with a white pick-up, a mere four years after the carefully sexless interracial romance of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

But aside from that scene—and the iconographically loaded image, during the climax, of black militants turning fire hoses on white people—Shaft’s racial politics are surprisingly middle-of-the-road. Shaft may kid Lt. Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi) with lines like “It warms my black heart to see you so concerned for us minority folks,” but he humors the white cop, and mostly cooperates with him. The script is careful to disassociate its fictional black-power revolutionary group from real ones like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, but it also shows them to be ineffectual, and Shaft is ultimately interested in their manpower, not their politics.

In other words, it’s a film that straddles its lines carefully, just as Shaft must code-switch between worlds: black and white, cop and crook, uptown and downtown (his black gangster client runs Harlem, but Shaft’s office is in midtown and he lives in the Village). Yet when it’s clutch time, Shaft is a full-on badass. In his first fight scene, the unarmed detective takes out two gun-wielding tough guys; in the climax, he swings in through a window like goddamn Batman, the black superhero rescuing the damsel in distress (stolen, not incidentally, by the white man).

Such elements became cornerstones of the blaxpoitation action template. Nelson George, who calls the film “a typical detective flick in blackface,” runs them down in his book Blackface: “black nationalists depicted as inept, if well meaning, supporting characters; young women, of all colors, are sexual pawns or playthings; white and black mobsters are in constant collaboration and conflict.” To that we can add a dash of respectability politics (Bumpy’s daughter is worth saving because she’s a “good girl” who’s “going to college”), righteous condemnation of drug dealing, and black characters working within the system while maintaining (though not without a struggle) their “blackness.”

Audiences ate it up. “Take a formula private-eye plot, update it with all-black environment, and lace with contemporary standards of on-and off-screen violence, and the result is Shaft,” opined Variety, predicting that “Strong B.O. [box office] prospects loom in urban black situations, elsewhere good.“ That was an understatement. Shaft’s $12 million gross helped save MGM, confirmed the audience that Cotton and Sweet Sweetback suggested, and prompted a flurry of imitators, including the following year’s quickie sequel Shaft’s Big Score!

Parks, Tidyman, and Roundtree all returned for the sequel—the latter with a healthy salary bump, to $50,000—though Isaac Hayes only contributed a single new song, turning over composer duties to Parks. Inexplicably, Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft,” which had won an Oscar in the intervening year, is nowhere to be heard, jettisoned in favor of a sequel song by O.C. Smith (and sequels, per usual, aren’t equal), a decision roughly akin to discarding the Bond theme after Dr. No.

It’s not the only questionable call. Instead of Lt. Vic, Shaft’s police foil is a smug black sell-out cop, whom Shaft calls a “black honky with big flat feet” and who is seen telling a black suspect, “Fuck your rights, go sue the city.” Shaft doesn’t really investigate a mystery this time around—the villain is revealed before our hero is, and the script stays that course—and no one actually hires him either. The script merely parachutes him into the middle of another war between Harlem gangs and the Italian mob. Parks was working with a larger budget, but you don’t see it until the third act’s tight car chase, followed by an ace boat/chopper sequence. The filmmakers clearly put their energies into a super-slick Hollywood ending—and it looks great. But they ended up sanding down what made the first film interesting; much of its uniqueness is in its rough edges.

The same goes for Shaft in Africa, which appeared the following year and took that character to the logical conclusion of his savior-warrior construct. Shaft is hired this time to penetrate a modern African slavery ring, and though he is initially resistant to the mission—he says the case is “out of my turf,” since “I don’t know any Africans, brother”—he ends up training and studying to go undercover as a native. Gordon Parks demurred from participating in this third and final installment, and white director John Guillermin (who would next direct The Towering Inferno and the 1976 King Kong remake) is extra careful with his camera placement during Shaft’s nude “stick fight,” but the sexual implications aren’t exactly subtle, and that’s before our hero smirks, “Guy named Shaft ain’t gonna be bad with a stick.” (Finally, someone said it.)

Africa has the broadest and perhaps clumsiest sexual messaging of the trilogy (and that’s putting aside its weird female genital mutilation subplot—don’t ask). Late in the film, our hero is seduced by the arch-villain’s insatiable white mistress, who initially queries, “How long is your phallus, Mr. Shaft,” and later tells him, “You’re the first man who’s ever made love to me the way a man should.” Shaft is, indeed, the private dick, detective as both superhero and super-stud. That scene falls during Shaft and his fellow laborers’ crossing from Africa to Paris, a water journey that’s uncomfortably crowded and dehumanizing, explicitly echoing the Middle Passage—and thus positing Shaft as a racial avenger. He ends up leading what amounts to a slave revolt, an unexpected Shaft-as-Nat-Turner twist, full-on retroactive wish fulfillment.

But wish fulfillment was ultimately what blaxploitation in general, and these films in particular, were all about. Characters like Shaft and Trouble Man’s “Mr. T” don’t do a helluva lot of detecting, per se; they’re more like urban independent cops, allowing their creators to make what amounted to police movies for audiences who didn’t like and didn’t trust police. (When a complicated film like Across 110th Street dealt with those complexities, neither black nor white audiences showed up.)

But the further they got from their mean streets, the less they reflected their day-to-day reality. Reflecting on the power of Shaft in his review of its sequel, the New York Times’ Roger Greenspun noted, “After every sort of big-town white detective from Marlowe to Madigan had obviously lost the freedom of the city, John Shaft—cool, insolent, clever—seemed a fair choice to take their place. For the detective is nothing if not indigenous; the best hero we have to offer, once we know the misery around us and our own despair.” However, “the new Shaft follows a new and glossier and tidier image, an image that is much more James Bond than Bogart.”
The Shaft sequels pivoted from the urban gangster bad guys of the first film to smugly erudite super-villains; Big Score’s plays a clarinet, for God’s sake. By the time he hits Africa, Shaft has to explicitly insist that he’s not James Bond, but it’s an easy conclusion to jump to—the line comes during a gadget briefing sequence, from his own junior varsity Q.

Yet the inclination towards such a character, for filmmakers and audiences, is understandable. In his book More Than Night, James Naremore attributes Parks and Van Peebles’ “black supermen” as a response to “decades of emasculated or nearly invisible black people on the screen,” but there was more at play here than that. By the early 1970s, black heroes were at a premium; Martin was dead and so was Malcolm, Fred Hampton and George Jackson, too, and the black revolutionary movement was scarcely in better shape than in its portrayals in films like Shaft. Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton’s in-fighting split the Panthers in 1971, and by early ’72, Newton was shutting down chapters—the ones that hadn’t been raided by police. Cleaver was in Algerian exile, and Bobby Seale was in jail. The Panthers had been undone by COINTELPRO, heroin, and ego. “We had the revolution,” Richard Pryor joked in 1976. “Remember the revolution, brother? We lost!”

But on screen, they could win. If he was enough of an outsider—his own boss, beholden to no one—the black man could be a hero. He could mouth off to cops, he could protect the community, he could be irresistible to women. He could come out on top, and truth and justice could prevail; he could do all of the things that white private detectives did back in the 1940s, and didn’t do anymore. When those white counterparts first appeared in the ‘40s, they served a similar function for an audience coming out of a Great Depression, fighting a world war, and uncertain about their future. That audience needed tough, straightforward heroes with an unerring moral compass; so did this one.

The black private eyes didn’t have the luxury, in this tense and uncertain time, of flirting with the existentialism of Hickey and Boggs or The Long Goodbye’s Marlowe or Night Moves’ Harry Moseby. Isaac Hayes may have called Shaft “a complicated man,” but there was nothing complicated about him, or any of his brethren. What you saw was what you got. “He was everything we’d always wanted to be,” said Samuel L. Jackson, who would take over the role of Shaft in a 2000 remake. “He was cool, he talked tough, he looked great, and he was fearless. He was a hero.”

In the ‘70s, black audiences looked at their movie detectives and saw what they wanted to be. White audiences looked at theirs, and saw what they were.

[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to films we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Our first round of Produced and Abandoned essays included Angelica Jade Bastién on By the Sea, Mike D’Angelo on The Counselor, Judy Berman on Velvet Goldmine, and Keith Phipps on O.C. and Stiggs. Over the next four weeks, Musings will continue with another round of essays about tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

When actor Charles Laughton’s now-classic directorial debut The Night of the Hunter premiered in 1955, it’d been a long road to the theater. The film had been in the can for a while, but the studio balked at its premise and execution: Was it a romantic drama or a horror film? A children’s fairy tale or adult entertainment? Marketing materials from the time suggest they never quite figured it out. The studio tried to bury it, but Laughton desperately wanted to go in a different route, traveling the country with his movie to build word of mouth the same way he worked in theater. Anyway, the film was largely forgotten or ignored until its “rediscovery” in the 1970s, when it was hailed a work of great genius. But that didn’t help Laughton, who passed in 1962 and never directed another film.

This brings me to the late Bill Paxton. He’d always considered himself a filmmaker, never an actor, though he’d appeared in some of the most successful films in American history, including Aliens, Apollo 13, The Terminator, True Lies, Tombstone, and so many others. He moved from Texas to Los Angeles at the age of 18, applied to two film schools, and got rejected from both. Acting, to Paxton, wasn’t a career path but a last resort to working in the movie business. Finally, eventually, he was able to direct his first film, Frailty, a dramatic thriller starring Paxton himself and Matthew McConaughey, about a man who believes he was told by God to kill demons disguised as humans, and the two sons who wonder if their father is going insane.

The film’s release was scheduled for September 2001. Then, of course, it wasn’t such a fun time to see misguided men murdering for their beliefs. The film was pushed to April of 2002 but was buried just as deeply as Laughton’s was, with relatively positive but not stellar reviews. This film, too, could not find a home. Not violent enough to be a full-on horror film, too suggestive for families, and both critical and embracing of religion, Frailty seemed to be a movie of too many paradoxes. Even now, it’s difficult to describe this film, which could either be about a serial killer or a savior, depending on how you look at it. Of course, Paxton, who played the touched-by-God father Meiks, felt it was clear that his character was an “Old Testament hero,” though even that qualifier does not answer the question of whether or not Meiks was “good.”

It’s worth noting that Paxton and Laughton lived parallel lives of sorts. Both were character actors, oscillating between the evil or fatherly and somehow exceeding equally at both, which may speak to the actors’ religious backgrounds and subsequent rebellions against them—a performer who can sense the struggle between good and evil in their characters is a successful performer.

Both men had mothers who were devout Roman Catholics and fathers who were ambivalent to the Bible. Laughton, as evidenced in his film, felt a certain amount of antipathy for the church—he was in the closet for most of his life—yet was still soaking in its parables and finding some value there. Paxton as an adult adopted an attitude somewhere between his Catholic mother’s and Pagan father’s, a dash of the genuine and the cynic. And just like Laughton’s film, Frailty is steeped in Christian lore. (Laughton also almost played the lead role of the Preacher in his own film, before his producer talked him out of it.) Both actors, it seemed, had something they desperately wanted to say about faith and could only do it as directors. But aside from these parallel lives and desires, there’s a more direct correlation between the two films.

When Paxton got the script for Frailty from fellow Texan Brent Hanley, he was immediately impressed by the writer’s “neoclassical background.” This was a moral tale, and Paxton saw the script reflected the literary “architecture” of the great Southern novels, like To Kill a Mockingbird, only mixed with contemporary Stephen King. He wanted to make Frailty“in a classical way, where you imply and create the horror in the mind’s eye, and show real restraint.” The first film he cited that convinced the producers he was the right one to direct the script was The Night of the Hunter.

Frailty does not possess the painstaking, revolutionary cinematography or German Expressionist theatrical qualities of Night, but cinematographer Bill Butler (who lensed Jaws, Demon Seed, and Child’s Play, among others) brings a style that melds high-contrast pulp with grim seriousness. There are times when Paxton explicitly calls to mind Night, as when a character’s disembodied head seemingly floats in black nothingness, a direct and loving rip-off of Laughton’s film.

Frailty’s structure relies on voiceover and flashback, as Matthew McConaughey, the grownup Fenton, tells the story of his father’s descent into madness to an FBI agent (Powers Boothe). It has the feeling of a Southern yarn or parable, and conveys a sense of innocence, even amid multiple murders. You’d never guess how quiet and thoughtful this film is from the monochromatic red-and-black promotional key art, and I can only imagine Lions Gate’s marketing struggled with finding the appropriate imagery to sell the movie while accurately conveying the story.

I know Frailty is a thriller. I can see Meiks raising an ax high to swing down and behead one of the humans he believes is a demon. I can see Meiks dragging his son Fenton (Matt O’Leary) into a freshly dug basement prison to hold him captive until he can hear God. And yet there is something oddly wholesome about Frailty in the same way there is something wholesome about The Night of the Hunter. Frailty is picking at the same basic scabs: the bewilderment of children forced to grow up fast and fight for their lives; the hysterics of fanatics gone too far; the isolation of belief. It is, despite its suggestions of violence, a story seen through a child’s eyes.

Paxton’s performance condenses the evil and the fatherly into a single character, which makes Meiks a totally believable enigma to the children and to audiences. Meiks is sure of himself and his mission, and he sees himself as an instrument of goodness. That knowing keeps him calm, not maniacal like a lunatic. In Night, we know that the Preacher is off his rocker, even if he truly does think he’s killing widows for God. In Frailty, there’s question from the beginning whether God really did visit upon Meiks, convincing him one night that he must kidnap and murder seven people from a list God has provided. Little Fenton doesn’t believe it. He’s the character with the strongest voice, the boy with an iron will.

One of the most successful aspects of Frailty is how it nails the peculiar ways children process information. When Meiks wakes up his two sons to tell them what his mission is, Fenton explains in voiceover that during breakfast the next morning, nothing else was spoken about dad’s impending murder spree, so Fenton was able to see his father’s late-night admissions as a bad dream, something that would pass and be ignored and never be spoken of again until maybe one day, years later, when it would pop into his head as a distant memory. This is a simple but phenomenal scene that exploits the inherent goodness in children and their overwhelming desire to make things normal and compensate for their parents’ shortcomings. When Paxton talked about that scene, he said, “the impotence of the children is where the horror is derived from.”

There are obvious things that can be said about Frailty’s commentary on religion. When the film was released, people couldn’t help asking Paxton what bearing it had on 9/11, what point he was trying to make. Admittedly, he wasn’t trying to make a point. The script was born in a world where men murdering for God seemed like something that happened elsewhere, to other people. But the longer he thought about it, the more Paxton understood that something in this film he made spoke to his own beliefs. He said, Frailty“belies the folly of man’s ego when he ordains himself to be ‘God’s destroyer.’ It’s such an egotistical idea–that whatever your beliefs are, whatever is up there needs man to carry out these devious and diabolical deeds. It’s not man’s job to do that.”

I’m frankly surprised there aren’t more movies like Frailty, ones that present a scarily realistic and sincere descent into fanaticism, especially seeing how fundamentalist Christianity and its partner, hypocrisy, has taken such a stronghold in American culture. Anyone who’s ever seriously studied or practiced Christianity knows all too well the tension between the literalists and the interpreters, those who believe it should be taken at face value that God could simply whisper in your ear one day to join his holy war, and those who see God’s voice as an abstract. Frailty is chilling, because it asks what we would do if the fundamentalists were right. The film doesn’t offer many easy answers for this, even though the ending is supposed to be a definitive narrative twist. In the same way that I saw The Night of the Hunter and felt that Laughton’s criticisms of religion were ultimately criticisms of man, not God, Frailty elicits those same emotions. They’re both lucid depictions of a struggle with faith.

Unlike Laughton, Paxton would get the chance to direct one more film, 2005’s The Greatest Game Ever Played, before he would pass at the age of 61 from a stroke. His obituaries popped up in the usual entertainment mags, but also in publications like Christian Daily, Catholic Online, and Christ and Pop Culture, who proclaimed that “Christian Actor Bill Paxton” had died. Paxton had plans for other movies, one a sequel to Frailty, but it was difficult for him to get people to take him seriously as a director. In 2002, he said, “I don’t think you get respect as an actor in this town. But you get respect as a filmmaker.” When Laughton died, he was just that actor who played Quasimodo and the patrician statesmen. Who knows how we’ll remember Paxton in the future?

[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to films we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Our first round of Produced and Abandoned essays included Angelica Jade Bastién on By the Sea, Mike D’Angelo on The Counselor, Judy Berman on Velvet Goldmine, and Keith Phipps on O.C. and Stiggs. Over the next four weeks, Musings will continue with another round of essays about tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

One of the most pivotal moments in Michael Mann’s career came in the year 2000, as he and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki were location scouting for the director’s long-gestating Muhammad Ali biopic Ali. After shooting digital video (DV) of potential settings at night, as reported in American Cinematographer magazine, both men “began to fall in love” with what they saw in their test footage. “I was stunned by this one quality it had, which was not like moviemaking,” Mann recalled years later, discussing his discovery of DV. “There was a truth-telling style to the visuals, and the emotions were more powerful because it didn’t feel theatrical. I analyzed afterwards what was going on to make me feel this way, and I realized it was because we had subtracted the theatrical lighting… Everybody unconsciously sees it and knows that it’s something crafted, not something that feels real. That subtraction of the theatrical convention of how we light is very powerful.”

From his earliest efforts, Mann had tried to find compelling ways to depict subjective experience—to get behind a character’s eyes and find the emotional context of their actions. And digital photography gave him a tool that at once represented both the freedom and prison of subjectivity. On the one hand, as the director observed, it eliminated some of the artifice that so often mediates what we’re seeing onscreen; the video, especially when shot in low-light and natural conditions, had a jarring immediacy to it. At the same time, however, the pixellation lent everything an abstract quality, as if the images became more unstable the closer they got to reality.

Even as high-definition technology improved and the entire industry started shifting over to all-digital productions, Mann found ways to lean into the electric edge of video, highlighting its more otherworldly qualities—qualities that would come to dominate the filmmaker’s later works. Instead of offering a more fluid, “realistic” experience, each new picture would prove to be even more fragmented, a canvas of competing perspectives, gestures, textures, and tones. This alienated audiences to some degree. Seemingly commercial, star-studded endeavors like Miami Vice (2006) and Public Enemies (2009), while they did have their share of vocal defenders, were relative disappointments at the box office, in part because viewers found the use of video to be awkward, disorienting, ugly.

A similar sense of disappointment greeted Mann’s long-awaited cyber-thriller Blackhat when it was released in January of 2015. If anything, the backlash was even greater. While Miami Vice and Public Enemies had done some modest business, Blackhat proved to be an outright disaster. For Mann’s previous efforts, his studio, Universal, had stood behind him. “The key on looking at the profitability of Michael’s movies is that they’ve got a very long tail, well after the theatrical run,” the company’s then-co-chairman Marc Shmuger said in 2006. “[The films] do fantastically well in video, on all television outlets, overseas.“ But in the case of Blackhat, its expansion into several international territories—including star Chris Hemsworth’s native Australia—was scrapped within a couple of weeks of the domestic release. (Frankly, we’re probably lucky we even got a Blu-ray.) It didn’t fare much better critically. While some high-profile reviewers such as Manohla Dargis and Peter Travers praised the film, most were unimpressed and even annoyed.

A year after Blackhat’s release, at a Brooklyn Academy of Music retrospective of his work, Mann unveiled a director’s cut that switched the order of certain major narrative developments, and brought a bit more focus to other characters besides Hemsworth’s. While this new version was an improvement, it did also delete certain important scenes from the film. Mann suggested at the time that he was still toying with the movie. Don’t be surprised if yet another cut eventually emerges; even he’s not entirely pleased with the picture, it seems.

Blackhat follows the efforts of a group of American and Chinese officials as they attempt to track down a mysterious hacker who has attacked a Chinese nuclear reactor and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. To help them in this endeavor, the government allows convicted hacker Nicholas Hathaway (Hemsworth) to leave prison in exchange for his cooperation. Working together with an FBI agent (Viola Davis) and his old college roommate (Leehom Wang), now a captain in the Chinese army, Hathaway attempts to uncover not only the hacker’s identity, but also his motives and location.

It’s a conventional crime movie set-up with a dose of ripped-from-the-headlines relevance. The run-up to the film’s release focused on the topicality of its premise, which was bolstered by the notorious Sony Pictures hack that resulted in millions of private emails from the movie studio being made public. Eventually determined to be a North Korean cyber-espionage operation designed to punish the studio for releasing the action-comedy The Interview, the Sony hack led to chaos and embarrassment for many in Hollywood and brought home to the rest of us the vulnerability of our online information. All of this seemed to feed interest in Mann’s latest project.

Don’t worry; I’m not about to suggest that Blackhat flopped with audiences and critics simply because it didn’t meet the undue expectations raised by the Sony calamity. In truth, Mann had once again followed his own curious muse and made a film whose formal ambition exceeded its narrative ones. And the results are marvelous—a vision of a digital world where seismic events happen with casual ease, while physical reality constantly plays catch-up, all shot in a style that brings a dreamy, free-floating unease to every exchange.

When video liberated Mann, it also turned him, in some ways, into a different director, one focused as much on the textural possibilities of cinema as much as its narrative ones. But in other ways, the director did not change: He still sought to explore his characters’ subjective experiences, and he also still remained obsessed with authenticity. The latter factor has often resulted in his de-dramatizing moments that other filmmakers might play for cheap thrills. Mann’s characters, particularly in the later efforts, talk a lot about procedure and protocol, using language that attempts to approximate the way people in these circumstances might behave in real life. One of Blackhat’s biggest plot points involves hacking into a top secret NSA program that allows Hathaway to discover a clandestine server in Jakarta; the scene is surrounded not by a gunfight or a physical stand-off, but a murmured phone call between the FBI agent and the NSA, and a lot of discussions about who should be in the room when the hack occurs. Its initial consequences aren’t gun battles or SWAT teams but more phone calls, with moderately raised voices—bureaucrats talking to other bureaucrats.

In the Director’s Cut of the film, the chaotic effects of the villain’s malicious running-up of soy prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is conveyed through a scene involving a giant cargo ship attempting to dock in the Netherlands. The captain discovers that the spike in soy prices has suddenly increased the value of the ship’s cargo, which means that the vessel—dramatic music, please—no longer carries the appropriate level of insurance required to enter the port. It’s a fascinating scene, but it practically thumbs its nose at the notion of conventional stakes-raising.

There’s very little narrative “release” in Blackhat. Each plot development is effectively a screen, or veil, behind which we find yet another one: An ID card photo leads to security-cam footage, which leads to a tattoo, which leads to a prison database, which leads to a motel visit, which leads to an e-mail, which leads to a Korean restaurant, which leads to more security-cam footage, which leads to a testy messaging exchange, with still no clue in sight as to who the villain is or what he wants to do. Sure, there’s a fight or two along the way, and a body count, but the film’s narrative through-line is one of frustration and obfuscation. Even the bad guy’s ultimate aim is not world domination or revenge—easy motivations to understand—but cornering the market in tin through an almost absurdly circuitous route.

By stringing us along in this manner, and presenting what at times seems like a wild goose chase that spans the whole planet, Mann exposes just how thoroughly technology has infiltrated our lives, and how vulnerable that makes us. There is a slow-burning paranoia throughout Blackhat, amid all these seemingly minor exchanges and hushed-voice conversations. And the director makes sure to include lots of shots of surveillance, both actual and symbolic: When our heroes visit Hong Kong, a giant billboard with a face on it hovers in the street outside their rooms, adding to the unnerving sense that they’re all being watched.

In some ways, Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and Blackhat could be seen as a trilogy: Although they are all ostensibly crime dramas, they’re ultimately the work of someone obsessed with technology. Miami Vice, filled with screens, depicts the fluidity of identity in the modern (or should that be post-modern?) world: Its heroes are constantly pretending to be someone else, and with each new persona they seem to lose sense of who they really are. Public Enemies is all about an old world being taken over by the emerging modern surveillance state. As the old-school bank-robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is pushed away by the newly-technologically-emboldened mob and cornered by a newly-connected federal policing bureau, the very texture of the film changes, and the movie-like images onscreen give way to highly-pixelated, low-light video. It’s a formal analog to the story’s central conceit.

In Blackhat, law enforcement and the criminal element are no longer extending their individual networks; they’ve essentially merged, so that one can enter the other with the click of a button.  While the film is filled with plenty of the kinds of quiet, brooding close-ups of which Mann is so fond, it’s also a movie of wide shots and patterns, of grids both real and imagined. Its visual scope is impossibly broad: The camera dives deep into the circuitry of our digital age, but it also pulls back to reveal the blinking, endless lights of our 21st century cities, drawing an explicit connection between the nano-imagery of the cyber realm and the macro-imagery of the cityscape. The film opens with a depiction of a malicious computer worm entering a network, but the process is presented not as text on a screen but as a surge of lights taking over a dense field of blocks, almost like an invading army of luminescence entering a darkened city. Over and over again, the camera finds images that resemble a motherboard or microchip—a trellised bridge here, a patterned balcony there. One major shootout takes place against a series of ominous structures that look like the surface of an integrated circuit board.

Hathaway may be fluent with technology, but at first he’s a character who is imprisoned in his own mind, who doesn’t fit the patterns of the world around him. Nevertheless, he has to navigate this milieu, not just manipulating the digital landscape around him but also physically trying to locate his quarry: the rogue hacker Sadak (Yorick van Wageningen), wreaking havoc on the planet’s markets and nuclear reactors. As such, the film depicts a process whereby Hathaway moves away from the grid (both conceptually and visually). In the climactic face-off, set amid a traditional Indonesian ceremony, a crowd of dancers and marchers in colorful garb move in unison, while Hathaway locates and then stalks his prey, in slow-motion, trying to blend into his surroundings. The effect is that of watching a virus insinuate itself into an established pattern, and Mann revels in the cinematic splendor of this idea.

In effect, the whole film charts Hathaway’s attempt to get closer and closer to the rogue hacker—to lift all the digital screens until there is only the physical. “It’s not about ones, or zeros, or codes,” Hathaway yells at Sadak in their final face-off, which is a surprisingly visceral scene—he has to subdue the villain not with computers or guns, but by stabbing him repeatedly in close-quarters combat, using tactics learned in prison. And yet, there’s still something bleak and unfulfilling about this final confrontation. Sadak is silent, maybe even perplexed, as if the reality he’s being presented with were somehow foreign to him. “I’m a gamer,” he says at one point. “I hire others to do sub-symbolic stuff.”

Let’s face it: Only Michael Mann would dare have a villain utter the words “sub-symbolic” during a climactic face-off. But that’s the tension at the heart of Blackhat, between real life, with its bureaucrats and its hushed conversations and obsessions with protocol, and the digital sphere, with its split-second armies of light and its ability to change people’s destinies with casual abandon. The film captures the uneasy cadences and beauty of this new reality, and it possesses an uncontainable truth about the way we live today.

[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to films we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Our first round of Produced and Abandoned essays included Angelica Jade Bastién on By the Sea, Mike D’Angelo on The Counselor, Judy Berman on Velvet Goldmine, and Keith Phipps on O.C. and Stiggs. Over the next four weeks, Musings will continue with another round of essays about tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

It’s generally accepted that John Carpenter wasn’t a personal filmmaker—not personal in the way that Martin Scorsese, only five years his senior and Italianamerican from the start, was. Carpenter grew up movie-crazy in the ’50s and ’60s. He wanted to make Westerns exactly at the moment when that became an unrealistic career goal. His heroes were Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and, above all, Howard Hawks. It’s been nourishing to listen to Amy Nicholson’s wonderful eight-part podcast Halloween Unmasked, still in progress, and to hear Carpenter—usually oblique in interviews—open up about his boyhood in the Jim Crow–era South. He mentions visiting an insane asylum during a college psych trip and locking eyes with a prisoner who spooked him. That may be the basis for killer Michael Myers but, by and large, this was a guy who wrote what he dreamed up, not what he knew.

That’s not to suggest Carpenter didn’t develop his own signature style. When he arrived in Los Angeles in 1968 to attend film school at USC, he reinvented himself, transforming from a Max Fischer–like creative wunderkind (he was a rock guitarist and high-school class president) into a laconic, bell-bottomed cowboy who listened more than he spoke. He was too cool for nerdy Dan O’Bannon, who worked with him on Dark Star. He was too cool for Hollywood itself, even after he’d succeeded there, rarely mingling socially and turning down projects like Top Gun and Fatal Attraction.

But the cool act was a bit of smokescreen. I once asked Carpenter about it, and he owned up to a private sense of pain in regard to his work. “I take every failure hard,” he told me in 2008, singling out the audience’s abandonment of The Thing, a remake of his favorite film (one that actually improves on its source). “The movie was hated. Even by science-fiction fans. They thought that I had betrayed some kind of trust, and the piling on was insane. Even the original movie’s director, Christian Nyby, was dissing me.”

Carpenter would rebound from that 1982 commercial disaster—as well the indignity of getting sacked from Firestarter—by playing the game even better. He directed Jeff Bridges to a Best Actor nomination on Starman (that’s as rare as a unicorn for a sci-fi performance) and, just as things were turning golden, blew all his capital again on 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China, which was rushed and subsequently buried in the massive shadow of Aliens. “You try to make a studio picture your own, but in the end, it’s their film,” Carpenter said in our interview, the Kentucky rascal turned bitter. “And they’re going to get what they want. After that experience, I had to stop playing for the studios for a while and go independent again.”

This is the pivotal moment in Carpenter’s career, the one that fascinates me the most. It should fascinate more people, given what the filmmaker did. Divorced and with a two-year-old son, Carpenter is, at that point, 38 years old. He’s already feeling like a Hollywood burnout, with a decade of ups and downs to prove it. The solution was a pay cut, a big one: Prince of Darkness, financed through “supermensch” Shep Gordon and Alive Films and released in 1987, would be made for a grand total of $3 million, the first title in a multi-picture deal that guaranteed Carpenter complete creative control.

Scrappy but never chintzy, Prince of Darkness is the most lovable of movies. On the surface, it has all the cool minimalism a JC fan could ask for: elegant anamorphic compositions (Gary Kibbe’s muscular cinematography adds millions more in production value), a seesawing synth score, a one-location “siege” structure akin to the director’s Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing. The movie also has Alice Cooper killing a grad student with a bicycle. It has a swirling canister of green Satanic goo in a church basement.

Critics, by and large, were unkind. In a representative review from the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “surprisingly cheesy,” singling out first-time screenwriter Martin Quatermass for particular scorn (he “overloads the dialogue with scientific references and is stingy with the surprises”), not realizing that this was a pseudonym for Carpenter himself. Would it have mattered? Released days before Halloween, Prince got clobbered by the gig Carpenter turned down, Fatal Attraction, still surging in its sixth weekend.

But below the surface—and still a matter for wider appreciation—is the film that Carpenter dug himself out of his psychic hellhole to make: his most personal horror movie, starring a version of himself. Prince of Darkness is about watching and waiting. In a way, it’s a romantic view of the auteur’s own time at school. It’s a movie about the evil that stares out of the mirror (i.e., yourself). Like all of his films, it arrived under the possessive title John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. In my mind, that apostrophe is actually a contraction: John Carpenter Is Prince of Darkness. And Prince of Darkness is him.

First, let’s understand what $3 million means in 1987. To compare it to some other movies of the same period, Blue Velvet’s budget is twice as large. Hannah and Her Sisters, largely shot in Mia Farrow’s apartment, was funded at $6.4 million. When Scorsese decided to go indie and make his audacious The Last Temptation of Christ, he had a $7 million allowance—and that’s for robes and sandals. Carpenter, on the other hand, would be doing practical special effects in camera. He’d be doing a movie with gore and supernatural nuttiness. In a now-quaint New York Times article from April 1987 titled “Independents Making It Big” (“The major studios have abandoned small, serious, risky films, the kind that often win prizes”), Merchant Ivory’s Oscar-winning A Room With A View gets prime positioning with a big photograph; that one has a $3 million budget, roughly. (Not coincidentally, Carpenter’s financiers, Alive Films, are name-checked in the piece as the producers of Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind.)

Coming off Big Trouble in Little China’s estimated $20 million budget (it was probably more), Carpenter would be making a radical shift. But he agreed to Alive’s terms. He’d return to doing things fast and smart, to distilling his vision down to its cleanest, clearest grammar, to getting it done in 30 days (Halloween was shot in 20, over four weeks in May 1978). Even if you disregard the whole of Prince of Darkness’s content—and we won’t be doing that—Carpenter’s desire to work in total artistic freedom is breathtaking. He will do what it takes to move forward.

A little plot: In Prince of Darkness, scientists, theologians and academics plunge into a dilapidated church where they power up their equipment and study a mysterious genie in a bottle: an “anti-god.” The scenario has some of the pseudo-tech fizz of Poltergeist or, in a lighter vein, the Harold Ramis scenes in Ghostbusters. It’s not meant to hold up under scrutiny. Carpenter, who says he was reading books about quantum uncertainty at the time (maybe not the most comforting bedside material given his professional predicament), gives pages of chewy dialogue to the twin father figures of his oeuvre: Donald Pleasence, returning from Halloween and Escape from New York, plays an unnamed, worried priest; and Big Trouble’s wizened Victor Wong appears as an esteemed professor of metaphysical causality.

If the movie has a conventional hero (it doesn’t), it’s Brian, a student who splits the difference between creepy and generically handsome. He’s played by Jameson Parker, then a TV star on Simon & Simon. Or at least I think it’s Jameson Parker. Unlike his more famous San Diego private detective, Brian sports a robust, porn-star-worthy moustache. It makes him look swarthy, mysterious—a little like the lanky John Carpenter himself, who shoots these early scenes in classrooms and hallways at his alma mater, USC. “I spent many happy years at SC as a film student,” Carpenter says on Shout! Factory’s collector’s Blu-ray. “I really enjoyed myself. I learned everything about how to make movies there.”

Watching Prince of Darkness is as close as we’ll come to seeing the director’s formative years re-enacted, memoir-style. In getting back to basics, Carpenter decided to do it literally. Brian sits in class listening; he has a bit of a Laurie Strode moment looking out the window, distracted. Who is he? He’s a young scientist observing evil, almost flirting with it. He spies on a pretty girl in the courtyard (Lisa Blount). She’s got a boyfriend and it irks him, wordlessly. Later, Brian will woo her to bed and use some hard-core Howard Hawks dialogue on her: “Who was he? The one that gave you such a high opinion of men?” he says, straight out of Lauren Bacall’s playbook in To Have and Have Not. It works. She kisses him.

The movie isn’t all wish-fulfillment. In fact, it’s charming how fully the Carpenter surrogate recedes into the team; Brian isn’t even a factor in the final showdown. Maybe his job is to watch other people vanquish evil. That would make sense, since it’s his creator’s comfort zone. In the meantime, the offscreen Carpenter is building some of his grossest sequences, spraying unsuspecting people in the mouth with streams of ectoplasm (à la Rob Bottin’s landmark FX in The Thing), mounting parallel action and deploying beetles, maggots and ants where necessary.

Prince of Darkness has one moment that’s proven unforgettable, transcending even the horror genre. It’s an eerie transmission, the voice slowed down and distorted: “This is not a dream…not a dream…” DJ Shadow samples it a few times on his groundbreaking debut, 1996’s Endtroducing. (The voice is actually Carpenter’s, impossible not to notice once you’ve been made aware of it.) He’s supposed to be a future dude reaching backward in time—“from the year one, nine, nine, nine”—maybe to prevent a biblical apocalypse. All we see is a jittery handheld shot of a silhouetted robed figure slowly emerging from the church, the ominous end-of-the-world smoke gathering.

The economy of the shot is beautiful, Carpenter achieving the texture of a half-remembered nightmare using only a capture-video-off-a-TV-screen trick. (It’s very Inland Empire—and come to think of it, that basement cylinder of swirling green evil is a lot like the glass box from the first episode of the rebooted Twin Peaks: The Return.) So in a situation where Carpenter is facing his most prohibitive spending limits, he’s actually expanding his craft. Prince of Darkness signals his own creative rehabilitation after turning his heel on the studios. Or, to quote the film’s poster: “It is evil. It is real. It is awakening.”

What does it mean that Carpenter’s big payoff involves a mirror? These Cocteau-like shots were some of the most dangerous to pull off. One of them involved plunging a prosthetic hand into highly toxic liquid mercury (a substance the crew had to drain from their hydraulic cranes just to make the gag work). Then, to capture the action on the “other side” of the mirror, poor Lisa Blount had to swim submerged in a darkened swimming pool while an underwater camera shot upward at the glimmering surface. I include these technical details not only to express awe at Carpenter’s commitment (along with that of his collaborators), but also to stress the obvious: The mirror climax was really important to him. The movie’s final seconds are the whole of Prince of Darkness’s reflexivity in a single cut: Brian, woken from a double dream, approaches his bedroom mirror. We see from the perspective of the glass. He touches that porn ’stache tentatively, then reaches out. Cut to black.

It’s not easy to touch that mirror—to walk away from everything you’ve labored to achieve over years, to a place where it’s just you and your talent and what you can do. To me, that’s what Prince of Darkness expresses, subtly. Creatively, the experiment worked: It led directly to Carpenter’s 1988 stealth masterpiece They Live, his most confident political statement and a kindred project in its use of real L.A. locations. That film’s critical reputation has already been defended at large. But maybe it’s time to rally behind the moment slightly earlier, when the director had to rediscover who he was, and what he wanted—and when he found a way to turn everything around.

[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to films we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Our first round of Produced and Abandoned essays included Angelica Jade Bastién on By the Sea, Mike D’Angelo on The Counselor, Judy Berman on Velvet Goldmine, and Keith Phipps on O.C. and Stiggs. Today, Musings concludes our month-long round of essays about tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

A decade before the presidency that elevated insults like “betacuck” and “soyboy” into political discourse, Nick Cassavetes made Alpha Dog, a cautionary tragedy about masculinity that audiences ignored. Time for a reappraisal. Alpha Dog is about a real murder. Over a three-day weekend in August of 2000, 15-year-old Zach Mazursky—in reality, named Nicholas Markowitz—is kidnapped and killed by the posse of 20-year-old San Fernando Valley drug dealer Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) with a grudge against Zach’s older brother. No one thought the boy would die, not his main babysitter Frankie (Justin Timberlake), not the girls invited to party with “Stolen Boy,” and not even the boy himself, played with naive perfection by Anton Yelchin, who played video games and pounded beers assuming that his new captor-friends would eventually take him home.

Cassavetes’ daughter went to the same high school as Nicholas Markowitz. The murderers were neighborhood kids and he wanted to understand how fortunate sons with their whole lives ahead of them wound up in prison. The trigger man, Ryan Hoyt—“Elvis” in the film—had never even gotten a speeding ticket. Prosecutor Ron Zonen hoped the publicity around Alpha Dog would help the public spot the real-life Johnny, named Jesse James Hollywood, who was still on the lam despite being one of America’s Most Wanted. So the lawyers gave Cassavetes access to everything: crime scene photos, trial transcripts, psychological profiles, police reports, and their permission to contact the criminals and their parents. Cassavetes even took his actors to meet their counterparts, driving Justin Timberlake to a maximum security prison to get the vibe of the actual Frankie, and introducing Sharon Stone to Nicholas Markowitz’s mother, a broken woman who attempted suicide a dozen times in the years after her son’s death.

Alpha Dog, pronounced Cassavetes, was “95 percent accurate.” Which was part of why it got buried, thanks to Jesse James Hollywood’s arrest just weeks after the film wrapped. Cassavetes hastily wrote a new ending to the movie, but his problems were just beginning. Hollywood’s lawyers insisted Alpha Dog would prevent their client from getting a fair trial, and used the threat of a mistrial to force Zonen off the case. “I don’t know what Zonen was thinking, handing over the files,” gloated Hollywood’s defense team. “It was stupid.”

The publicity, and the delays, dragged out the pain for Markowitz’s family, especially when they heard Cassavetes had paid Hollywood’s father an, er, consulting fee. “Where is the justice in that?” asked the victim’s brother. “This just goes on and on, and I’m spending my whole life in a courtroom.”

The film, too, was pushed back a year from its Sundance premiere. Despite casting a visionary young ensemble—Alpha Dog was my own introduction to Yelchin, Ben Foster, Olivia Wilde, Amanda Seyfried, Amber Heard, and the realization that Timberlake, that kid from N*SYNC, could actually act—no one noticed when it slid into theaters in January of 2007. It wasn’t just the bad press. It was that audiences couldn’t get past that Cassavetes’ last film was The Notebook. No way could the guy behind the biggest romantic weepy of a generation make something raw and cool.

But he had. Alpha Dog is a stunning movie about machismo and fate, two tag-team traits that destroy lives. Think Oedipus convincing himself he can outwit the oracle of Delphi. But Sophocles’ Oedipus telegraphs its intentions, elbowing the audience to see the end at the beginning. Greeks sitting down in 405 BC knew they were watching a tale that came full circle. Every step Oedipus takes away from his patricidal destiny just moves him closer to it.

If you map Alpha Dog’s script, instead of a loop, it looks like a horizontal line that plummets off a cliff. For most of its running time, Alpha Dog could pass for a coming-of-age flick where a sheltered kid with an over-protective mom (Sharon Stone) taps into his own self-confidence, right up until the scene where he tumbles into his own grave. Audiences who’d missed the news articles about the case weren’t clued into the climax. Cassavetes doesn’t offer any hints or flash-forwards, not even an ominous “based-on-a-true-story.” (The film might have been more successful if he had.) Instead, he lulls you into joining the kegger, watching Zach crack open beer after beer as though he expects to live forever. “There’s a movie sensibility that the film doesn’t conform to,” said Cassavetes. “You don’t watch this film. You endure it.”

As Zach, his eyes red-rimmed from bong rips, not tears, is shuttled between party dens and wealthy homes, he’s given several chances to escape. He’s even revealed to be a Tae Kwan Do blackbelt who can jokingly flip his captor-buddy Frankie (Justin Timberlake) into a bathtub. But Zach stays put—he doesn’t want to get his big brother Jake (Ben Foster) in more trouble, not realizing that Johnny is too busy making nervous phone calls to his lawyer and his aggro father Sonny (Bruce Willis) to get around to asking Jake for the $1200 in ransom money.

Zach’s death is disorienting, almost as if Psycho’s Marion Crane got murdered in the second-to-last reel. In a minivan en route to his execution, he innocently tells Frankie he wants learn to play guitar. “It bugs me that I don’t know how to do anything,” he sighs. Meanwhile Johnny assures his dad that there’s no need to call off the killing. “These guys are such fuck-ups, nothing’s gonna happen,” he shrugs, a rare example of cross-cutting that defuses tension in order to make the shock of the gunfire even worse. Up until the last second—even after Frankie binds him with duct tape—a sobbing Zach still can’t believe Frankie would hurt him, and honestly, Frankie can’t believe it himself. And Yelchin’s own early death makes you ache for him to get a happy ending, which Cassavetes dangles just out of reach.

This is how evil happens, says Cassavetes. Masterminds are rare. Instead, people like Frankie can be basically good, but can also be panicky and passive and selfish. Shoving Zach in Johnny’s van was an idiotic impulse by upper middle-class kids, who flipped out when they realized the snatching could get them a lifetime sentence. There’s no honor or glory in the violence. Johnny, the cowardly ringleader, talks tough, but orders his most craven friend, Elvis (Shawn Hatosy), to pull the trigger while he and his girlfriend Angela (Olivia Wilde) get drunk on margaritas. And after the murder, one side effect is that Johnny can’t get an erection. When Angela tries to get Johnny in the mood in their hideout motel, the walls close in on him, suffocating the mood.  

Away from his boys, Johnny is weak. Surrounded by them, he’s the king. Alpha Dog sets up a culture of animalistic dominance. Johnny’s rental house is basically a primate cage at the zoo, only decorated with weight benches and Scarface posters. All of Johnny’s boys jockey to be his favorite and tear each other down in order to bump up their own rank. Kindness is weakness. When a fellow dealer with the ridiculous nickname Bobby 911 cruises by to negotiate a sale, he snarls at a guy who vouches for him: “You don’t need to tell him I’m good for it, man!”

Elvis, the future shooter, is the lowest member of the pack. He can’t ease into the group without Johnny ordering him to go pick up his pit-bull’s poop in the backyard. Why do they pick on Elvis? He owes Johnny a bit of money, but the source of the scorn is simply group think. No one wants to be nice to the outcast, and Elvis is just too sincere to be taken seriously. When Elvis offers to get Johnny a beer, the guys tease him for being in love with Johnny. When he says sure, he does care about Johnny, they twist words into a gay panic joke. Elvis can’t win—they won’t let him—so he literally kills to prove his worth, and winds up sentenced to death row, where the real boy, just 21 at the time of the shooting, remains today. Another life wasted.

Cassavetes humanizes the killers because he wants us to understand how their micro decisions add up to murder. Not just the gunmen. Everyone’s a little to blame. The kids who got drunk with “Stolen Boy” and didn’t call the police. The girls who told Zach that being kidnapped made him sexy. Even Zach’s older step-brother Jake, an addict with a twitchy temper who escalates his war with Johnny to a fatal breaking point. Neither boy will back down over a $1200 debt, and there’s an awful split screen call when Johnny dials Jake intending to bring Zach home, but Jake is so boiling over with anger, his Bugs Bunny voice shrieking with outrage, that Johnny just hangs up the phone.

The opening credits, a montage of the cast’s own old home videos, underline that these were young and happy children—the kind of kids people point to as examples of the suburban American ideal. Over a treacly cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” we watch these real life boys being cultured to be brave: riding bikes, falling off dive-boards, running around with toy guns, going through the rituals of young manhood, from bar mitzvahs to karate lessons. Yelchin—recognizably dark-eyed and solemn even as a toddler—grins wearing plastic vampire teeth.

It takes another ten minutes for Yelchin’s character to sneak into the film sideways in a profile shot eating dinner with his parents, played by Sharon Stone and David Thornton. His Zach is barely even visible as brash Jake barges into the scene to beg for money. They say no, Jake stomps out, and Zach finally makes himself seen when he runs after his brother, begging to go anywhere less suffocating. Zach’s mom loves him so much that she watches him sleep. “I’m not fucking eight!” he yelps. He’s 15—practically a man, in his own imagination—and desperate to get away, even if it means mimicking Jake, a Jewish kid who’s so scrambled that he has a Hebrew tattoo on his clavicle and a swastika inked on his back. Jake starts to say that he wishes his own mom cared about him that much, but as soon as he gets vulnerable, he spins the moment into a joke. “Boo for me,” Jake grins, and takes another swig of beer.

“You could say it’s about drugs or guns or disaffected youth, but this whole thing is about parenting,” grunts Bruce Willis’ Sonny Truelove. “It’s about taking care of your children. You take care of yours, I take care of mine.” He’s half-right—his parenting is half to blame. Sonny and his best friend Cosmo (Harry Dean Stanton) taught Johnny to bully his friends. Cosmo, looking haggard and hollow, mocks Johnny for having one girlfriend. “You gotta plow some fucking fields,” he bellows. “Men are not supposed to be monopolous!” Not that “monopolous” is a real word, and not that Cosmo fends off women himself, except in his own big talk.

Cosmo and Sonny’s own posturing gradually emerges as being more dangerous than Johnny’s because it’s more integrated into society. They’re the type of creeps who rewrite the rulebook to suit them, and attack journalists who try to tell the truth. When a fictitious documentarian asks Sonny about his son’s drug connections, the father shrugs, “Did he sell a little weed? Sure.” But when the interviewer presses him further, Sonny snaps, “I’m a taxpayer and I’m a citizen and you are a jerk-off.”

Cassavetes, of course, understands growing up with a father who left a giant footprint to fill. His father, John Cassavetes, the writer-director of Shadows and Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, was one of the major pioneers of independent cinema. He died when Nick was 30, before his son attempted to take up his legacy. “We never really talked film theory,” said Cassavetes. “My experience with my dad was more along the lines of how to be a man, how to be yourself, how to free yourself from what society tells you to do, how to release yourself as an artist.”

It makes sense that Cassavetes would make his own ambitious, and maddeningly singular film. And perhaps it even makes sense to him that fate has yet to give him the reward he’s earned. Alpha Dog deserves to be acknowledged as one of the most incisive examinations of machismo and the banality of evil. But like his fumbling criminals, he knows he’s not really in charge of his life. Admitted Cassavetes, “I’m not smart enough to really have a master plan for my career.”

You don’t find it; it finds you, most likely in the dead of night.

You can’t sleep, you may or may not be on drugs (you don’t have to be, though it’d be a lot cooler, as they say, if you were), and you’re clicking around the weirder back channels of YouTube again. You pinball from ‘80s-era NASA test footage to “36 NEW SHOWS FROM THE HELLISH MID-SEASON TV OF 1979” to the deep catalog of VHS oddities discovered and uploaded by a dedicated corps of obsolescence fetishists. It’s here, among the creepy camcorder detritus and lost video-dating profiles, that “Electric Light Voyage” has been waiting for you.

Independent video distributor Media Home Entertainment Inc. released a tape by that title in 1979, re-christened as such by the label in a likely effort to piggyback on some of the then-ubiquitous Electric Light Orchestra’s popularity. The video nevertheless begins with the original introductory card that dubs the 60-minute compilation “Ascent 1,” after flashing the retro-sleek logo of Astralvision Communications, Inc. The gap between the titles chosen by the distributor and the production house—one flashy and fun, the other chilly and practical—speaks to the dual identities of this unusual, singular work. “Electric Light Voyage” sounds like an N64 game, while “Ascent 1” nods to the project’s roots in science and experimental art. This wondrous, strange nostalgia object effectively splits the difference between those two worlds, a treat for both avant-garde aficionados and people looking for something to stare at.

The conflicting titles make it all the more difficult to ascertain information about this curio, little-seen and widely forgotten as it is. The short-lived Astralvision Communications Inc. seems to have been established for the sole purpose of assembling this collection of shorts; the Astralvision trademark lapsed after it failed to renew in the ‘80s. The end credits clarify this as a joint effort from a loose collective of video artists in the general orbit of University of Illinois at Chicago during the ‘70s. Astralvision acted as a sort of professional extension of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory—the National Lampoon to their Harvard Lampoon, if you please—an on-campus program that incubated the earliest exchanges between art and computer engineering.

The ELV had been founded by two graduates-turned-researchers, Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti, who would each go on to fabulous success in the field. DeFanti created GRASS, the programming language that gave us Star Wars’ Death Star sequence, and Sandin invented the Sandin Image Processor, a device that “drew” visual patterns the way a Moog “plays” sound. A young woman named Barbara Sykes learned of their Electronic Visualization Events—brain-expanding live performances of video and audio synthesizing in real time—and started to attend during her time at the university. She would become their most brilliant student and valued collaborator, credited here with “Video Synthesis” on multiple segments. The trio contributed the lion’s share of the work that ultimately made up “Electric Light Voyage”/“Ascent 1,” and in packaging their esoterica for public exhibition, they opened a direct portal from their technological be-ins and the museum galleries they later occupied to after-dark living rooms across America.

So, uh, what is it? Sykes, Sandin, DeFanti, and their cohort may not have been the very first video artists, and they were far from the first experimental filmmakers, but they did pioneer a new form borrowing liberally from both of those traditions. The Sandin Image Processor, the implement of choice on most of the included shorts, brought abstract expressionism into the virtual plane. Twiddling the right knob or turning the right dial on a physical panel sends a signal through a number of filters that can alter the shape, color, and motion of the feedback pattern. The description on the back of the VHS box offers a somewhat snappier explanation:

This 60-minute electronic fantasy featuring computer animation can control and change your moods of elation and tranquility. To change or enhance your mood, simply play a musical selection that accompanies your present feeling – it’s mesmerizing! The abstract colorized computer animated visuals are artfully paced with their complimentary soundtrack. Images explode with color while soothing with flowing shapes and rhythms. Great for parties or individual contemplation.

In other words, it may not have been a coincidence that DeFanti named his most significant innovation after a slang term for marijuana. A viewer can nearly smell the reek of cannabis wafting out of the psychedelic swirls, begging as they are for the overtaxed descriptor of “trippy.” But there’s more to it than, say, the iTunes Visualizer. Though that program serves a similar function, creating a pleasing computerized light show for anyone looking to zone out, the methods at use in “Ascent 1” are more sophisticated in their deliberateness. The Visualizer employs a code to generate a randomized series of neon-colored portals that shiver along with the beat of whatever song’s being played; each segment of “Ascent 1” encompasses a carefully plotted journey with timed peaks and valleys. (Oh, so that’s why they call it a trip!)

Functionally speaking, it’s much closer to something like Plantasia, precisely due to its nature as a functional artwork. Synthesizer virtuoso Mort Garson composed that 1976 album for the express purpose of accelerating houseplant growth, and the Astralvision house went about their process with a utilitarian bent as well. They believed that visual and aural stimuli could have an immediate, visceral effect on a person’s physical and mental state. Drug users just happen to be particularly susceptible to a phenomenon the creators wanted to share with everyone, in which feelings of anxiety and unease can be dissolved via sensory triggers. The technique is far from airtight—the highly subjective effects of drug use mean one person’s good vibe could be someone else’s hell-abyss—but it’s affective and effective all the same. Sober or no, fully engaging with the images flushes out everything else and casts a therapeutic spell. The tape hiss makes the rest of the world fall silent.

The ambitious terms of the project’s conception shouldn’t detract from its merit as an artwork for its own sake, however. Each short tests the limits of a medium then in its nascency, somewhere between the first tinkering and complete mastery of such devices as the Image Processor. The engineers conducted wild stylistic experiments playing primal forces against one another: music vs. noise (and within that, organic instruments vs. the synthesizer’s various blips), stillness vs. movement, color vs. shape. Bob Snyder and Michael Sterling’s scores move freely between industrial sound effects, synthetic whalesong, Moog tinkering, and free-form electric piano. Of the many new frontiers charted, most fascinating among them may be the full elimination of editing; images melt into one another, legato light fades and mutating geometric forms taking the place of cuts.

The attempts to induce a sort of artificial synesthesia were not without a textual content, either. Though none of the shorts even comes close to anything that could be charitably called a story, they do occasionally sketch variations on a single theme, not unlike the jazz accompanying some of the segments. Sykes took the lead on the first two segments, “By the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak” and Circle 9 Sunrise,” both compositions originating during the Electronic Visualization Events. Her later work would engage with feminine imagery in a more concrete capacity, focusing on Athena and Amazons and their mythical ilk. Still, look closely and the beginnings of her interest reveal themselves in the curvaceous, vaguely yonic linework. Sandin and DeFanti share credit on “Spiral Ryral,” which contrasts a Warholian silhouette of a humanoid figure with rows of spermatozoa wriggling in the background. Symbolic iconography nudges the wandering brain in this direction or that, and it floats along with the onscreen tide.

Even as they fall under its hypnotic sway, modern audiences cannot help but approach this vintage find from an anthropological remove. Animation ages differently than live-action cinema, and computer animation’s no exception. The Internet’s now full of videos toying with sensation using fractal imagery — there’s an argument to be made that the Astralvision house came up with ASMR decades ahead of schedule — but there’s an engrossing primitivism to “Ascent 1” that can’t be found elsewhere. It’s in league with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr, or Pete Drake’s trial runs with the talkbox: a vision of the future now rooted in the past. “Ascent 1” suggests a daring vision of an art form’s possible future that’s all the most intriguing for only getting it right a little. Sykes, DeFanti, and Sandin’s compositions presage the advent of the screensaver, and yet they unmistakably belong to the past of laser Floyd shows and industry-standard cassette use. It’s in the intangible elements: the crackly edges of the robot hymns on the soundtrack, the soft-definition fuzziness that recalls both the filmstrip’s warm grain and the antiseptic sheen of videotape. Not quite analog and not quite digital, crude and wondrous, “Ascent 1” is a window to a time when computer technology was still unsettled territory. In the melodies and murals of machines, we hear the pre-verbal burblings of a medium.