In his seminal tell-all Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger claimed to reveal the festering truth beneath the dream factory of the American film industry. His was a bemused but cynical perspective on the business of show, reveling in the sordid juiciness of early Tinseltown controversies that usually concluded with tragedy, if not death. Representatives of the film idols referred to in the book lined up to denounce the tales of drug-fueled orgies and suicide cover-ups as conjecture and falsehood, and indeed, the modern reader would do well to take Anger’s gossip with a metric ton of salt.

But rather than a factual history, Anger’s book has more value as a portrait of a certain mentality specific to this professional milieu. Even if Clara Bow didn’t bang the entire USC football team, this progenitor of the celeb exposé spoke to true conditions of the culture surrounding the movie colony, suggesting that decadence and luxury made—and continue to make—it too easy to go mad with power. Readers flocked to Anger’s toxic oil spill of a book for the same reason airport bookstores regularly sell out of the latest A-lister’s confessional: it’s devilishly pleasurable to watch fame and fortune make someone act crazy.

The best Hollywood send-ups have adopted this jaded outlook, turning an eye inward to find a carnivorous business that masticates talent and spits it out once the flavor’s gone. The recent, toothless likes of Argo, La La Land, and The Artist have courted the label of satire with a line about expanded universes here or a jab at blowhard producers there, but these little rib-nudges have been affectionate counterpoints in otherwise adulatory valentines to the magic of the movies. The good stuff cuts to the dark heart of an industry that gives creative types—and who could possibly be more mentally infirm than a writer—too much money and influence for their own good.

The history of showbiz spoofery is the history of insanity: the finest entries have used the assorted pressures of filmmaking to push their characters to their wit’s end as an absurd representation of the corrosive forces of Hollywood. Starting from Anger’s sensationalist tracking of Frances Farmer’s long, sad descent into madness, all roads have led to the sanatorium.

The main thoroughfare is the derelict drag of Sunset Blvd. Billy Wilder was the first to conjure a human manifestation of filmmaking’s maggoty underbelly with Norma Desmond, a crumbling grand dame cannily played by crumbling grand dame Gloria Swanson. Swanson applied the exaggerated techniques of silent film acting to the talkie form in order to create an affected style marked by its own period, a symbol of decay in an industry obsessed with the new and young. She constructed an insular fantasy life in her isolated castle lair as a coping mechanism for her fall from prominence, and for his blackest joke, Wilder allowed her delusions to become reality in the film’s concluding punch line. Norma’s deteriorating psyche imbues the film around her with a bit of her mania, too; a funeral for a chimp Charlestons along the line between the silly and the somber. Even as he verged on the outlandish, he struck a chord; Louis B. Mayer famously bellowed to Wilder at an L.A. screening, “You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!”

But this strain of satire truly hit the fever-pitch sweet spot with S.O.B. in 1981, trading the showbiz-specific indignity of aging past relevance for that of creative compromise. Director Blake Edwards plays a cruel and pernicious god to his Job-like plaything of Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan), a producer driven to desperation by his first flop and willing to do anything in order to salvage it. He’s put through the wringer several times over, bungling four suicide attempts in increasingly pathetic fashion before arriving at the epiphany that sex was the missing ingredient from his character study of a closed-off woman retreating into the recesses of her own mind. (All we see of the fictitious Night Wind is a disturbing, surreal dream sequence set to “Polly Wolly Doodle” twice over, first as an unsettling juvenile fantasy and then as a doubly unsettling eroticized juvenile fantasy.)

The film industry, at least as it’s shown here, doesn’t function like other professional sectors. Nobody really knows what’s going to connect with an audience and what won’t, and to those working on the inside, it often feels like no rhyme or reason governs the separation of hits and misses. Edwards makes Felix into the casualty of a sense-defying work culture, where no bad idea or underhanded maneuver is off limits so long as it yields success at the end of the day. Felix grows deranged as a result of his constant humiliation, and resolves to play as dirty as the weaselly studio executives who cheat him out of the rights to his picture once it starts to look like a success. By the moment he’s killed due to his own harebrained plan, he’s been reduced to a nattering nutjob, martyred by a system seemingly resistant to logic.

Robert Altman would torment another power-producer to the point of breaking a decade later with The Player, but the next film to actively integrate the mentality of lunacy into its overall atmosphere would be the gleefully unhinged Death to Smoochy. (It’s no coincidence that all the films mentioned so far drew powerfully polarized reactions at the time of their release; a draught this bitter has never gone down easy.) Shifting to the other side of the camera, director Danny DeVito mined laughs by transposing the cutthroat nature of big-leagues entertainment to the bush leagues of kids’ shows. He juxtaposed the core nastiness of back-room wheeling and dealing with the outward-facing nicety of Barney and his ilk, and in doing so, delivered an uncommonly misanthropic take on how the sausage of entertainment gets made.

Moreover, the film presented a physical manifestation of hyperactive id in Robin Williams’ corrupt, ruthless kiddie showman Rainbow Randolph. Starting at a coked-out 10 and only turning the dial higher from there, Williams rendered his role as a manifestation of pure, white-hot hate, screaming every line at the top of his lungs. As he goes about his dogged mission to dethrone his replacement Smoochy (Ed Norton as the chipper Sheldon Mopes), DeVito suggests that Randolph’s frenzied dysfunction simply reflects the fucked-upped-ness of his climate. The ostensibly incorruptible Sheldon is offered the seductions of money, pleasure, and influence, and while he’s able to remain true to his principles in the face of it all, Randolph’s the foil illustrating what happens to those without the required moral fortitude. He has a near-complete psychotic break at feature length, his mind irreparably warped by the deleterious forces of televised playtime.

Tropic Thunder took a more specific set of reference points for its deflation of Hollywood ego and pretension, ultimately driving its subjects to the brink of sanity as well. Namely, the myth of Francis Ford Coppola and the notoriously calamitous production of Apocalypse Now (dutifully chronicled in the making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness) provided the guideline for this send-up of war films and the people who play make-believe in them. Coppola reportedly went a touch native while mounting his titanically ambitious epic in the jungles of Vietnam, and likewise, the prima donna actors dropped into the wild start to lose it when they realize the danger they’re in is bona fide.

Writer/director/star Ben Stiller gets in some good potshots at scuzzy corporate types (Tom Cruise’s craven studio head Les Grossman comes off looking the worst of all), but mainly lampoons the actors taking their craft seriously enough to lose sight of themselves. Both Stiller’s macho action hero and Robert Downey Jr.’s award-festooned boob slip into their assigned roles, extending Method acting to the point of fractured identity. Rather than taking aim on the machinery that generates movies, Stiller trains his crosshairs on the process of acting itself, mocking those artistes so wrapped up in “becoming” their role that they can’t tell where it begins and they end. Stiller accelerates their mental strain by dumping the cast in enemy territory, but they don’t end up anywhere that Jared Leto hasn’t gone of his own volition.

Just about all entertainment that goes behind the scenes of entertainment agrees that the job’s not a part-time gig, that creating art on this kind of scale demands a lot from the people involved. The gentler critiques have stopped the symptoms at workaholism, but these more incisive films expand that list to include a wide array of psychological hazards. Los Angeles runs on hysteria, on the single-minded willingness to do anything and everything to make the show go on. The innumerable “troubled-but-brilliant” biopics have made the suggestion that inner anguish is the noble sacrifice that true talents make for shouldering the burden of genius; in an art form as prone to disaster, complication, and overall FUBARification as cinema, it’s just the cost of doing business.

After any viewing of Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), one is tempted to say, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” From the perfection of its casting, with Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Alan Hale, and Melville Cooper, to its lush score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to its unity of tone (despite a midcourse change of directors), to what historian David Thomson called it’s stained-glass Technicolor, it represents the apotheosis of a genre as well as an exemplar of what the old factory-style studios could deliver when the personnel on staff and the story they were telling found a near-perfect alchemy. However, Robin Hood had only dim antecedents and no successors, so to say, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” isn’t quite accurate. But for this one picture, “They never made ‘em” is closer to the mark.

The swashbuckler genre, that of swords flashing in times ranging from the Dark Ages to the 18th century Caribbean to which Flynn’s greatest film belongs, began in 1920 when Douglas Fairbanks switched from comedies to action films with The Mark of Zorro. Right in that first picture, Fairbanks and director Fred Niblo established conventions that were repeated in film after film and still recur in cinematic cousins such as the Star Wars movies. The hero is, in the words of Robin Hood co-writer Norman Reilly Raine, a “swashbuckling, reckless, rakehell type of character,” who is in rebellion against corrupt government authority, but never government authority in general—the swashbuckling hero is not an anarchist or terrorist, but in many senses a conservative who wants to see power exercised responsibly or by the right people. The hero is an expert with the sword and other weapons, but is also an acrobat, capable of amazing stunts such as riding down a mainsail on the point of a dagger (Fairbanks in his 1926 The Black Pirate). He wins his cause in one on one combat with the villain, usually in a long duel, after which he is often revealed to be a disguised noble, or at the very least forgiven for his trespasses against a government that had lost its way.

Zorro came out of pulp fiction by way of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlett Pimpernel, but as Fairbanks and others went on to capitalize on the film’s success, they found additional sources in the novels of Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers, The Count of Monte Cristo), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, The Black Swan, Scaramouche), Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy), and the pirate and Robin Hood tales of Howard Pyle. Despite the deep well of material to adapt, the run of swashbucklers largely halted with the simultaneous decline of Fairbanks—he was 46 in 1929, the year of The Iron Mask, his last genre film and the first in which, as if to underscore the passage of time, he died—and the arrival of sound. 

It wasn’t just that Fairbanks was now a bit old and somewhat paunchy for an action hero. Other actors might have picked up cloak and rapier, but nascent sound technology made it impractical for a hero to bounce all over the screen while delivering dialogue. As hilariously and accurately recalled in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), movies were almost back to the fixed camera and proscenium arch style of the early days, when filmmakers couldn’t do much more than film plays as staged. Sound rapidly evolved to allow for more dynamic productions. In the meantime, Hollywood reveled in films set in contemporary times that explored sex, crime, and even the odd glimpse of nudity—prominent swords gave way to prominent nipples.

Alas, the new candor only lasted so long due to the strict enforcement of the Production Code that began in 1934. Now the studios had to offer clean thrills, which is to say pure romance without innuendo and visceral—but not prurient—excitement. A small handful of successful 1934 films—MGM’s Treasure Island with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver and a too-young Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, independent producer Edward Small’s The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat as the revenge-minded Edmond Dantes, and the Britain-originating The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard as the title character—suggested that public taste would welcome romantic adventure in place of earthier forms of romance.

Warner Brothers’ entry was Captain Blood. Donat initially committed to taking the title role of an Irish doctor who inadvertently finds himself on the wrong side of an attempt to overthrow King James II and is condemned to serve as a slave in the Jamaica colony, but he withdrew at the last minute for reasons that are still unclear but may have been as simple as a health issue and as complicated as his mistress refusing to spend several months in California. The film’s producers fantasized about Howard, Fredric March, Clark Gable, and Ronald Colman (the last of whom would later excel in the 1937 swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda for David Selznick), and tested Brian Aherne and designated Bette Davis costar George Brent before studio head Jack Warner suggested they try Flynn. The 26-year-old Tasmanian was on the payroll, after all; might as well use him. 

In retrospect, it’s amazing how all the elements of a successful Flynn swashbuckler came together at once, but again, for all the negatives inherent in the studio system, one plus was that it functioned as a huge sorting bin for talent that could be deployed as needed. Flynn and the director Michael Curtiz would be together for years. De Havilland, going on 20, was a film neophyte the studio was trying to establish. She and Flynn would eventually make another seven films together (eight if you count the review film Thank Your Lucky Stars) and tantalize the public with one of the screen’s great unconsummated but nevertheless real romances. Rathbone is on hand as an antagonist with a deadly sword (something he didn’t have to fake), a role he would reprise not just in Robin Hood but in pictures as diverse as The Mark of Zorro (1940) opposite Tyrone Power and The Court Jester (1955) in tongue-twisting battle against Danny Kaye. 

And then there was Flynn himself, vaulted instantly to stardom by the picture. The son of a marine biologist and a distant mother he came to despise, Flynn never completed his formal education due to the peripatetic existence required by his father’s career and his own propensity for getting expelled from whatever school his parents placed him in. By the time he was 18, he had worked as a mail clerk and a stevedore, and he competed as an amateur boxer before leaving Australia for New Guinea to prospect for gold. In addition to his efforts to get rich quick, he worked a series of jobs with the island’s various tobacco and copra plantations, got into a series of scrapes he would spend the rest of his life embellishing, and somehow, in 1933, ended up playing Fletcher Christian in an Australian film, In the Wake of the Bounty. This seems to have put the idea of becoming an actor in his mind, and that year he went to Great Britain and got work in a repertory theater company. The next year he was the lead in the film Murder at Monte Carlo, a film financed by Warner Bros. to honor British laws requiring a certain percentage of films exhibited in the country must have originated there. Flynn’s work was promising enough to intrigue the studio (completing a kind of circle, he was recommended by an acquaintance, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and they brought him to Hollywood.

Critics have long considered Flynn a poor actor. If true, this would certainly be unsurprising given his journey from New Guinea knockabout to leading man took a little over a year, with training that consisted almost entirely of the 22 plays in which he performed for the Northampton Repertory Players in England. It was certainly true at times in Captain Blood. Flynn was nervous and his readings were often stiff. As he became more comfortable, Curtiz was ordered to reshoot certain scenes so that Flynn could give a better performance. Yet even in the finished film there are many lines that die in his mouth. He never was good at limning deeper emotions. He’s far more polished in his second film, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Curtiz), and yet when he’s asked to react to a brutal massacre of soldiers and civilians by tribesmen on the Indian frontier, he tosses off the line, “Those poor little kids… horrible,” with all the anguish of a man ordering a ham sandwich. It’s something he’s saying, not feeling.

And yet, he was also able to convey a brio that few other actors, then or now, could equal. It is often remarked that Flynn could carry off a period costume in a way that contemporaries such as Clark Gable and Cary Grant could not. (Each had a famous flop in this regard, the former with Parnell, 1937, directed by John M. Stahl, and the latter with The Howards of Virginia, 1940, Frank Lloyd). Midway through Captain Blood, Peter Blood leads his fellow slaves to escape, capture a ship, and embark on a career of piracy with himself as captain. As they ready the ship to depart Jamaica, Flynn shouts, “Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft! There’s no chains to hold you now! Break out those sails and watch them fill with the wind that’s carrying us all to freedom!”

It’s a ridiculous speech—no one really talks like that, least of all in 17th century Jamaica. Yet, while Flynn couldn’t mourn murdered children on screen with any real passion, he could make lines like that believable. It doesn’t hurt that he was beautiful. A joyous Flynn was simply radiant, his elation in liberation contagious. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, he could also bring a convincingly grim intensity to a duel to the death, which he animated not via the complexity of the swordplay (as a swordsman, Flynn was able to fake an excellence that far exceeded his technical ability) but through personality and character. Compare his climatic duel with Rathbone in Robin Hood to the endless and mostly mute balletics of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen that close Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (2005, George Lucas, God help us). There is an exchange between Flynn’s Robin Hood and Rathbone’s Guy at the outset of what will clearly be a long and fatal fight:

Robin (smiling): Did I upset your plans?
Sir Guy: You’ve come to Nottingham once too often!
Robin: When this is over, my friend, there’ll be no need for me to come again!

Or moments later, when Robin is down and Guy has the advantage:

Sir Guy: You know any prayers, my friend?
Robin: I’ll say one for you!

And with that, he escapes once more. It would be a pleasure to report that Warner Bros. recognized the alchemy they created and made a dozen more films in this vein, but it didn’t happen that way. Some of that was due to the studio’s grind-‘em-out ethos, a great deal to Flynn himself, and some to the way World War II disrupted lives in ways both monumental and trivial. “Peak Flynn” was short-lived, and during that time he made only one more pure swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk in 1940 (Curtiz), with an honorable mention to 1937’s The Prince and the Pauper, in which he acts in support of (and steals the picture from) the juvenile twins Billy and Bobby Mauch. It would be eight years before The Sea Hawk received a follow-up, The Adventures of Don Juan, a very different kind of swashbuckler with a very different Flynn, and also his last of inarguable merit. 

Period pictures took time to put together, something antithetical to the way Warner Bros. viewed actors and films. This was the studio of gangster pictures and backstage musicals, both of which could be knocked out quickly. The careers of James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who appeared in both kinds of films and had arrived at Warners together ahead of Flynn, are instructive. They began in 1930 with Sinner’s Holiday and rapidly ascended to stardom. By the time Flynn arrived five years later, Cagney had appeared in 23 films and Blondell in 36. These actors were shuttling from soundstage to soundstage, sometimes starting their next picture before their current one had quite been finished. Similarly, Bette Davis came to Warners with The Man Who Played God in 1932. Though she fought relentlessly against being tossed into the studio’s meat-grinder (“For the first time in my life I don’t care whether I ever make another picture or not,” she wrote to Jack Warner in 1939, “I am that overworked”), she nevertheless made another 34 pictures by the end of the decade. Jack Warner was heard to say, “I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday,” and the studio did its best to work on that pace.

Flynn wasn’t worked quite as hard as Blondell, who appeared in 10 films in 1932 alone and was once made to shoot with a burst appendix (within five years Flynn had starred in 17 films), but the studio was in no way willing to keep him idle long enough for the building of castles and Spanish galleons sets to be justified by the right script. In the interim they tried romantic dramas, western after western beginning with Dodge City in 1939 (Curtiz), and, as current events soon required, war pictures. Very occasionally, because Flynn requested it, he got to do a light comedy like Four’s a Crowd (1938, Curtiz), in which he romances de Havilland and Rosalind Russell. A mélange of what were already screwball tropes, Crowd isn’t a very good picture, but Flynn is at ease in it and there is little reason to doubt that he could have carried off more comedic parts.  

Yet it came to be accepted with a kind of glib certainty that the public would only watch Flynn as an adventurous hero, and a sword-wielding, tights-wearing hero at that. Even he came to believe it. Yet if drama was beyond him—as the New York Times commented in its review of his 1938 drama with Davis, The Sisters, “There are moments, perhaps, when [the film] may grow just a wee bit burdensome, especially when Flynn is trying to look as if he believed in his despair”—it is also true that he was contracted to the wrong studio if he was going to get a chance at the Cary Grant-like parts he craved. 

In the roughly 30 years between the introduction of sound and the end of the classic studio era, Warner Brothers made many comedies but relatively few are memorable. Think of the screwball film, the sped-up version of farce that was one of 1930s Hollywood’s lasting contributions to the culture. None of the classics of the genre originated on the Warners lot, as an attenuated greatest hits list confirms:

• It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934, Columbia)
• Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934, Columbia)
• My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936, Universal)
• The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937, Columbia)
• Nothing Sacred (William Wellman, 1937, Selznick International)
• Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938, RKO)
• Holiday (George Cukor, 1938, Columbia)
• You Can’t Take It With You (Capra, 1938, Columbia)
• Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939, Paramount)
• His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940, Columbia)
• The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940, MGM)
• The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941, Paramount)
• Ball of Fire (Hawks, 1941, Samuel Goldwyn Co.)

The American Film Institute list of “America’s 100 Funniest Movies,” compiled in 2000, contains 48 films made during the studio era (through 1960, broadly speaking). Warners has exactly two, Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Auntie Mame (1958), both of which were made after Flynn’s decline. At Warners, Bugs Bunny made the quality comedies. 

This is no indictment of Warners; one can make a similar list of westerns that excludes MGM unless one is willing to go out on a limb for late-career Wallace Beery programmers. Each studio had house styles that led them to favor certain genres at the expense of others. At the risk of over-generalizing, Warner Brothers did certain things well: When Darryl Zanuck was production chief, fast-talking gangster pictures and backstage musicals. With Hal B. Wallis running the studio, it specialized in Paul Muni biopics, giving Humphrey Bogart opportunities to be brave or cynical or cynically brave, and Bette Davis the opportunity to be defiant or tragic or tragically defiant. What Wallis and his cohort couldn’t quite figure out how to do is to use Flynn in a sensible way if they couldn’t push out a Robin Hood on a regular basis. This was complicated by world conditions—high-budget costumers weren’t viable after World War II closed the European market—and Flynn’s rapidly intensifying personal dissipation. It is impossible to know how many roles doubts about his professionalism, his simple ability to come to work and stay sober, or to come to work at all for that matter, cost him. This is particularly applicable to costume pictures, always expensive affairs that needed to stay on schedule to make money.

Other studios tried their hands at swashbucklers, though the war had the same chilling effect on their period pictures that it did on Warners’. Fox plugged Tyrone Power into the genre with success beginning with 1940’s The Mark of Zorro and another Sabatini adaptation, The Black Swan (1942). Both are good movies, with the detailed sets and brilliant technicolor of the latter especially memorable. Neither, though, breaks new ground or, without grading on a curve for their being genre pictures, rises above being just decently entertaining.  The former was directed by Rouben Mamoulian, remembered today for staging the original production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, innovative camera movement that defied the static nature of early talkies, and the “Isn’t It Romantic” sequence in the 1932 Maurice Chevalier musical Love Me Tonight, in which, through the use of montage, the Rodgers and Hart song spreads infectiously from the protagonist ‘s tailor shop to people on the street, armies in the field, and eventually makes it way to Jeanette MacDonald, the object of his song. 

Unfortunately, not much of Mamoulian’s imagination is in evidence in Zorro, which suffers from problems of pacing, confusion as to whether the story’s key antagonist is Basil Rathbone’s arrogant Captain Pasquale or his master, the corrupt alcalde played by J. Edward Bromberg, a weak love interest in Linda Darnell, and, in common with many later super-hero films, a fascination with Power’s performance as the foppish “secret identity” Don Diego Vega, that displaces the title character. The Black Swan (Henry King) is a better film that benefits from vivid color and strong supporting turns by Maureen O’Hara, George Sanders (buried in so much fake hair as to be almost unrecognizable), and Laird Cregar as Captain Henry Morgan. Cregar more or less steals the picture, but the larger problem to our modern eyes is that in costume and makeup Power’s Jamie Waring is a non-concussed Jack Sparrow whose approach to wooing O’Hara would today be classified as sexual assault.

The swashbuckler didn’t have time to establish itself at every studio before the war made the expense of the pictures impractical. Colman made the aforementioned Zenda with Fairbanks’ son Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. excelling as the villainous Rupert of Hentzau. It was a role that pointed to a future in which he finally followed in his father’s footsteps—just before Pearl Harbor, Edward Small would showcase him in one of what would now become a long series of Dumas adaptations, The Corsican Brothers (Gregory Ratoff). Colman was also an excellent Francois Villon, rabble-rousing French poet matching wits with King Louis IX, played by Rathbone in what may have been the performance of his career, in If I Were King (1938, Frank Lloyd). Fredric March suited up as Jean Lafitte, the pirate who teamed up with Andrew Jackson to win the Battle of New Orleans, in Cecil B. Demille’s The Buccaneer (1938) for Paramount. The South Africa-born Louis Hayward picked up the rapier for Small in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939, James Whale) and an exploitation of Small’s earlier success with Donat, The Son of Monte Cristo (1940, Rowland V. Lee). 

The war came and Power, Fairbanks, Jr., and Hayward went into military. Flynn was declared 4F. He suffered from tuberculosis, and as a chain smoker (seemingly nine Flynn pictures out of 10 depict him with a cigarette in his hand), he was doubling down on a disease that was turning his lungs into scar tissue. And so Flynn would be in pictures for the duration (depending on who is doing the writing, his inability to serve either distressed or relieved him), but he would do no swashbuckling. In the immediate pre-war years and into the war itself, he was still making fine films, but they were in other genres: Santa Fe Trail as an ahistorical Jeb Stuart in combat against Raymond Massey’s maniacal John Brown (and rubbing prudish costar Ronald Reagan the wrong way both on and off camera); with de Havilland as George and Libby Custer in They Died With Their Boots On; excellent as the boxer James J. Corbett in Gentleman Jim (only 33 years old, he suffered a mild heart attack on set); winning in a musical number (and none too pleased to be doing it gratis) in the all-hands-on-deck Warners revue Thank Your Lucky Stars; almost unrelievedly grim warring against the Japanese in Objective Burma!

When the stars returned, so too did the adventure romances, but the old panache, which had been limited to so few of the original films, was difficult to recapture. The new vogue for costumers kicked in about 1948 and lasted into the early 1950s. When the swashbucklers were bad or made in too slapdash a style (see, for example, the Cornel Wilde vehicles The Bandit of Sherwood Forest and At Sword’s Point, made by Columbia and RKO, respectively—the latter notable for giving Maureen O’Hara a chance to fight alongside the boys) they suffered from cheap sets, bad castle mattes and obvious sailing ship miniatures, a sameness of casting (whether, as with the ubiquitous Alan Hale, the actor always added something, or, as in the case of frequent villain Robert Douglas, were just there with a tired sneer), and American actors trying very hard to come off as a Frenchman, Briton, or Spaniard from the 1600s instead of a contemporary from Kalamazoo. Even if Tony Curtis (nee Bernard Schwartz) of the Bronx never actually said, “Yondah lies da castle of my faddah,” he and dozens of other actors came near enough to it with regularity. 

Sometimes this lack of attention to cultural and linguistic matters expresses a coded racism. Never mind trying to accept New Jersey’s Sterling Hayden as a French pirate (The Golden Hawk, 1952, directed by Sidney Salkow) or Nebraskan Robert Taylor’s uninflected robot speech as typical of a Saxon knight (Ivanhoe, 1952, Richard Thorpe); try not to notice how in Powers’ Zorro, all the white Europeans sound like contemporary Americans while all the Mexicans sound like Speedy Gonzales-style stereotypes.

Tone was a frequent problem. MGM had sat out the first round of swashbucklers, but in 1948 they gave Gene Kelly a chance to play D’Artagnan in a color remake of The Three Musketeers (George Sidney, who more typically worked the studio’s big musicals). The film is epically miscast. At 36, Kelly was old for D’Artagnan, but he had the panache and athletic ability to carry off the part. Unfortunately, his portrayal is far more broad and winking than any he ever allowed himself in a musical—his Jerry Mulligan in An American in Paris is downright dour in comparison. The film’s color scheme is as garish as the 1966 Batman television series, and the MGM stock company also lets the picture down, supplying Lana Turner and June Allyson for the female leads; both look lost, like they’re wondering when all this pageantry will be revealed to be the school play in a sequel to Good News.

Similarly, Burt Lancaster’s two forays into the genre, The Flame and the Arrow (1950, Jacques Tourneur) and The Crimson Pirate (1952, Robert Siodmak), while often entertaining, seem unsure if they’re adventure films or parodies. The former, set in 12th century northern Italy, has Lancaster as an archer unwillingly caught up in an insurgency against the German occupation of Lombardy, plays it fairly straight, whereas Pirate goes for outright camp. Both films continually pause so that Lancaster and his acrobat pal Nick Cravat can do circus stunts.   

Perhaps in the postwar world none of these films could take themselves seriously and prosper. Swords, hose, and chivalry had become much further removed from the present day than they had been in 1935. The planet had awoken to the grim realities of holocaust—that instigated by the Nazis in the immediate past as well as a hypothetical sequel augured by the creation and use of atomic weapons. The political concerns of a long-dead aristocracy no longer had plausible resonance. In both Captain Blood and Robin Hood, Flynn’s title characters are rebels, but neither primitive republicans nor anarchists. Rather, they’re in revolt against kings they perceive as illegitimate or abusive. In both cases, once proper authority is restored, they go back to being supporters of the established order. 

The films make certain the audience is clear that the heroes are no radicals. In The Black Swan, Power has this exchange with famous pirate Henry Morgan, who, having reformed, is now the governor of Jamaica and struggling to cope with a recalcitrant legislature:

MORGAN: I wish my nature hadn’t changed. I’d have made that whole assembly walk the plank.
WARING: You can’t go wrong drowning politicians, Henry.
MORGAN: No, no. We’re just day-dreaming, Henry.

Zorro too wants to overthrow a corrupt governor and replace him with his own father, a more enlightened despot, rather than rule by the people. The Three Musketeers act to preserve the monarchical rule of the House of Bourbon, not exactly the swiftest group ever to wear a crown, and Flynn’s Captain Thorpe of The Sea Hawk is a privateer, a legal pirate, who reports directly to Queen Elizabeth. 

The studios returned to the swashbuckling genre beginning in the late 1940s not because romantic escapism retained its old cache, but because postwar politics, including the HUAC hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood, made anything approaching a serious look at modern culture and politics impossible. To cite just one example, RKO’s Crossfire (1947, Edward Dmytryk) got studio head Dore Schary dragged to Washington for the subversive suggestion that the United States harbored at least one anti-Semite. Dmytryk was blacklisted. In addition, spectacle (even if only toy boats in a bathtub) was one thing they could do that television could not. Columbia in particular pumped these titles out with regularity and without distinction. 

It took Flynn’s return to the genre to give it a last shot of life, though given his defects, it would only be a one-time revival. After The Sea Hawk, Warners had spent a good deal of time trying to fit Flynn for The Adventures of Don Juan, a version of which they had made as a part-sound film with Flynn’s friend John Barrymore in 1926. Following in the Great Profile’s footsteps had appeal for Flynn, but the story of an indefatigable womanizer provoked bad associations and he refused to do the picture. In 1943 he had been tried simultaneously for two cases of statutory rape. Though acquitted, Flynn was robbed of his trademark joie de vivre. As he said in his posthumously-released autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, the acquittal was far from vindication:

…Those first thoughts of death, destruction, and suicide began to occur within me—which would not early or easily or perhaps ever vanish… Much of the will to live had gone… I knew I had lost. I know that I could never escape this brand that was now upon me: That I would always be associated in the public mind with an internationally followed rape case. 

The phrase, “In like Flynn” rapidly became a metaphor for scoring with a woman. At one point, Flynn joked that his book should be titled, “In Like Me,” but he wasn’t laughing. 

This made Warners’ take on Don Juan problematic for the actor. As scripted, the film would be a winking take on Flynn the serial seducer. He didn’t find this concept at all amusing, but by the late 40s he had apparently gotten enough distance from the trial and compiled enough consecutive bad reviews in other genres to frighten him into a retreat. He would be surrounded by a strong cast, including his friend and frequent costar Alan Hale, Viveca Lindfors as Queen Margaret, and (alas) the inevitable Robert Douglas. Flynn requested house director Vincent Sherman for the film because his own lack of professionalism had destroyed his relationships with his previous designated directors Curtiz and Raoul Walsh, and he was looking for someone pliable. 

The intervening years had made Flynn more of a fit for the part of an aging roué. Though not quite 40 years old, alcohol, amphetamines, morphine, cigarettes, tuberculosis, and heart disease had made him look 50, if not older in some lights. Accepting this, he played the part with appropriate weariness. At the outset of the picture, when he banters with a recalcitrant lover, the lines are delivered not with insouciance, but with fatigue:

DON JUAN: I have loved you since the beginning of time.
CATHERINE: But you only met me yesterday.
DON JUAN: That was when time began.

Flynn shrugs at the last line, as if he’s acting out a play Don Juan has performed too many times for a payoff that may no longer be worth the effort.

Don Juan is an enjoyable film that grows serious in its second and third acts as the title character becomes aware of a plot to overthrow the Spanish monarchy. It also takes time to chide Don Juan/Flynn on his profligate ways, putting these words in the mouth of Lindfors’ Queen Margaret:

We have received letters concerning you from our ambassadors all over Europe. It is with slight regard, and very little favor that your queen receives you on your return to Spain. You come back to us notorious, of ill repute, disgraced in your own country and abroad. You are no credit to this crown or to your flag… You have nothing to say?

Flynn’s was allowed only a chastened response: “There seems very little left to say, your majesty.”

The film climaxes in a duel between Flynn and Douglas on a grand staircase. It’s well executed despite the need for doubling Flynn. He was in poor shape; Sherman reversed one key confrontation between Flynn and Douglas in which it had been intended for Douglas to sit and Flynn to stand. In anticipation of the infamous final scene in Flynn’s Montana (Ray Enright, 1950) when Flynn, too winded or disinterested to do much more than show up, refused to stand for his picture-ending clinch with Alexis Smith (he lies on the ground and she cradles him in her arms), the hero spent the scene in a high-backed chair.

Nevertheless, Don Juan gets Flynn’s allure in spite of its chiding, despite Jack Warner seething at Flynn-inspired delays that caused cost overruns, despite the director discovering that the healthful, invigorating oranges he thought Flynn was eating in his dressing room were impregnated with vodka. As the picture ends, Queen Margaret asks Don Juan where he will go next. He shrugs. “Who knows? Into oblivion, I suppose, where most legends go.”

She is allowed to disagree. “No. There can be no oblivion for you. Where you go, life follows.”

This gets at something essential about the swashbuckling genre, something Douglas Fairbanks understood nearly 100 years ago and that Flynn also perceived, perhaps instinctively: The appeal is not in the setting, it’s in the excitement derived from watching a free spirit defy the dreary established order with nothing more than a sword or a bow and arrow. Not only can one man make a difference in these stories, he can find the whole thing to be highly amusing.

That’s why Flynn’s lines about the wind carrying him and his men to freedom resonate despite their ridiculousness, and why Robin Hood, alighting on a tree and shouting “Welcome to Sherwood Forest!” to a fussy Rathbone and de Havilland is such an elevating moment. It’s also why Ridley Scott’s darker take on the same material with Russell Crowe as Robin (2010) doesn’t: A gritty Robin, scarred by the horrors of the crusades, fighting his way up from poverty is probably a more plausible 12th century story (to the extent anything about Robin Hood is plausible), but swashbucklers aren’t about the brutality of history. They avoid it. They only see the upside, which is the high adventure inherent in cutting loose and standing up for yourself. Thus the film fails despite a quality director, leading man, leading actress (Cate Blanchett), screenwriter, and high production values. 

Essentially, no one needs to see the Zack Snyderized version of the swashbuckler, with all of the lighter elements inherent in these tales leeched out. Of course Robin Hood was grubbing in the mud like the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Of course pirates were thieves and murderers who slaked their lusts between heterosexual rapes with some forcible sodomy belowdecks. We know that. No one has to be told. No one needs to see Robin Hood v William Wallace: Dawn of Feudalism. 

That’s why, in the end, for the swashbuckler maybe there was only Errol Flynn, and even then it was Flynn only for a short period of time (though he would return to swashbuckling after Don Juan, it was out of career-saving necessity rather than in pursuit of good material). That’s why the genre didn’t work as well, to the extent it worked at all, with actors from Robert Taylor to Rock Hudson to Kevin Costner, Stewart Granger to Michael York, Robert Shaw to Walter Matthau (seriously, for Roman Polanski no less), Liam Neeson to Johnny Depp (whose Pirates of the Caribbean films are about neither pirates nor the Caribbean), and onward. Either the uplift is absent or, as with Lancaster, it’s all giddiness with nothing at stake.  

That’s not to say that no good films have been made in the genre since Flynn’s days. Granger’s Scaramouche (1952, George Sidney), with its endless climactic swordfight, is worth seeing, as is Richard Lester’s often campy take on The Three Musketeers (1973) with York as D’Artagnan. Walt Disney, his profits trapped in Great Britain, made a series of swashbucklers with Richard Todd in the lead roles beginning in 1952 which don’t deserve to be lost among all the animated films, including the studio’s anthropomorphic animal version of Robin Hood (1973, Wolfgang Reitherman) which is occasionally entertaining but isn’t terribly interested in its own main character. The 2002 remake of The Count of Monte Cristo (Kevin Reynolds) starring Jim Caviezel is solid. The list could go on, especially if broadened to include fantasy films that have elements of swashbuckling, like The Princess Bride and Stardust.

But return for a moment to Neeson and his version of Rob Roy (1995, Michael Caton-Jones). It ranks far to the right on the all joy and no consequences/all consequences and no joy scale. Neeson, not yet in his one-dimensional Taken mode, had the charisma to make the film the adventures of “the highland rogue” as the subtitle of the 1953 Disney version had it. That choice, though, would have been irrelevant given the sadism of Tim Roth’s villain, Archie Cunningham. In a low point for historic fantasy films, Cunningham tries to goad Rob by throwing his wife, Mary (Jessica Lange), over a table and raping her, after which Mary wades into a lake and desperately tries to wash his semen out of her vagina. Again, this is probably realism, but realism to the point of being exploitation, and it drags the viewer out of the realm of entertainment.

At the conclusion of Don Juan, Flynn and Alan Hale ride off in pursuit of new adventure, Flynn swearing that he is done conducting wild affairs with women. On the road, they encounter a beautiful female, and just like that Flynn’s promise is forgotten. When Hale calls him on this, Flynn responds, “My dear friend, there’s a little bit of Don Juan in every man. Since I am Don Juan, there must be more of it in me.” For the sake of the genre, it’s too bad there hasn’t been more of Flynn in subsequent actors, writers, and directors.  

“I ain’t no extra baby, I’m a leading man.”

— Tom Waits, Goin’ Out West

Tom Waits lights up the screen. The minute the singer appears in a film, he brings with him a sort of atmospheric baggage—we may not know what character he’s playing, but we know him. We know that no matter what the film is, Waits will lend his own distinct, off-kilter brand of weirdness to it. Waits has been playing characters all through his musical career, the boozy troubadours and raspy-voiced noir loners who populate his songs are all engaging Waits creations.

Using his distinct, gravel-caked voice, Tom Waits conjures up boozy ballads designed to be played low at 3 a.m. and melodies that might echo off the broken-down rides of an abandoned, haunted carnival. His is an eclectic style, combining blues, jazz, cabaret, Spooky Sounds of Halloween sound effects tapes, and more. This distinct, unmistakable style goes beyond Waits’ musical accomplishments, finding its way into his acting in the two dozen or so film appearances the singer has made.

Waits doesn’t consider himself foremost an actor. “I do some acting,” Waits tells Pitchfork. “And there’s a difference between ‘I do some acting’ and ‘I’m an actor.’ People don’t really trust people to do two things well. If they’re going to spend money, they want to get the guy who’s the best at what he does. Otherwise, it’s like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that.”

Waits’ first film appearance was in Sylvester Stallone’s 1978 directorial debut Paradise Alley. It’s a small part, with Waits essentially playing a version of himself, or at least the self he presents in many of his songs. The character, Mumbles, shows up at a piano, twitching and crooning. “When was the last time you was with a woman?” Stallone’s character asks him. “Probably before the depression,” Mumbles says. “What are you saving it for?” Stallone shoots back in that garbled manner of speaking Stallone has perfected. “I dunno,” Waits replies. “Probably a big finish.”

In the grand scheme of things, this is a nothing part; it was intended to be a bigger role, but Stallone cut it down to little more than a cameo. Yet what made it to the screen is distinct because Waits makes it so. Stallone is very still in the scene, leaning on Waits’ piano like dead weight. Waits is a study in contrast, never sitting still, his eyes half open. It might even be considered too much acting. When asked if acting came naturally to him, Waits replied, “It’s a lot of work to try and be natural, like trying to catch a bullet in your teeth.”

Waits’ career was at an all-time-low following 1978. He had grown tired of the music industry in general, having released six albums with very little commercial success. Battling depression and alcoholism, Waits left Los Angeles for New York and began a period of reinvention. “I just got totally disenchanted with the music business,” he would say. “I moved to New York and was seriously considering other possible career alternatives…the whole Modus Operandi of sitting down and writing, and making an album, going out on the road with a band. Away for three months, come back with high blood pressure, a drinking problem, tuberculosis, a warped sense of humor. It just became predictable.”

Waits’ music became more avant-garde, more eclectic. And his film career and personal life took a distinct turn in the 1980s. In 1982, Francis Ford Coppola hired Waits to write the music for One From the Heart, a romantic fable that Coppola wanted to make as a sort of palate cleanser following the troubled production of Apocalypse Now.

“I looked forward to the challenge,” Waits said. “I needed something to stimulate my growth and development. The sole process of making music that would adhere to film was still something new to me. So it was a little terrifying. But working with Francis seemed like a good opportunity.”

It was on the set of One From the Heart that Waits would begin his relationship with future wife and musical collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who worked as a script analyst for the film. The two had previously met at a New Year’s Eve Party, but it was during One From the Heart that the relationship blossomed. “She was a story analyst. Somebody told her to go down and knock on my door and she did and I opened the door and there she was and that was it,” Waits said. “That was it for me. Love at first sight. Love at second sight.“

One From the Heart would be a financial disaster for Coppola, but Waits and the filmmaker continued to collaborate. Coppola would cast Waits in small parts in his back-to-back S.E. Hinton adaptations The Outsiders (“I had one line: ‘What is it you boys want?’” Waits told Rolling Stone in 1988. “I still have it down if they need me to go back and re-create the scene for any reason.”) and Rumble Fish (“got a chance to pick out my own costume and write my own dialogue. Gotta nice scene with a clock.”)

Little by little, Waits was building a bit-part filmography, showing up in the background of films and stealing the show with little to no dialogue, catching the eye with his lanky frame and coiffed hair. Coppola would cast Waits again in 1984’s The Cotton Club. Waits plays the club’s MC, but most of his scenes were cut from a film that became more and more bloated during production.

Waits’ first big role would come courtesy of Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 Down by Law. Set in Louisiana, the film follows three convicts—John Lurie, Roberto Benigni and Waits—who escape into the bayou. Once again, Waits seems to be playing a variation of himself, or the self that he built through his musical career, although he insisted the character not be a musician. Instead, he’s a DJ. Waits’ inaugural scene kicks off with him creeping into his bedroom, trying hard not to wake up his sleeping girlfriend, played by Ellen Barkin. But Barkin’s character isn’t really asleep, and when we next see these two characters, she’s tossing Wait’s belongings out of their New Orleans apartment, disgusted with his philandering.

Waits spends the scene sitting on the bed, mostly silent as Barkin rages, tossing one vinyl record after another and hurling curses at Waits. Waits doesn’t fully spring into action until Barkin is about to toss his clunky, pointed, steel-tipped shoes. “Not the shoes!” he protests, sounding generally horrified. Later, he sits at the curb, his possessions scattered around him, slipping those shoes on. It is an overall commanding performance, illustrating that simple cameo appearances from the singer, while memorable, waste his natural hipster charisma. To put it simply, Waits is cool—the type of old-school cool that would likely come off as posturing if you caught someone trying it in public. Yet Waits makes it sing. His characters are perhaps never as cool as they think they are, yet the coolness is undeniable. These are the types of performances people want to emulate when young. You look at Waits’ ridiculous Frankenstein shoes in Down by Law and briefly think, “Where can I get a pair of those?”

In the somber, autumnal Ironweed, Waits plays Rudy, the physical embodiment of every boozy balladeer Waits has ever sung about, particularly in “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” (“And you can’t find your waitress with a Geiger counter/ And she hates you and your friends and you just can’t get served without her.”)

“I have a red nose, and I had a toothbrush in one pocket, a sandwich in the other. I don’t know why I got it, but I’m glad I did,” Waits said. The part found him playing alongside acting giants Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. “Nicholson is really a diamond cutter,” Waits said. “He’s a bank president and a bronc rider. He has a million stories; all of them are true. He’s a very generous actor, and he’s responsive, like a good musician.” The pair play off each other beautifully, with Waits not just holding his own alongside Nicholson but occasionally outshining him.

“At rehearsals, Tom Waits looked like any moment he might break at the waist or his head might fall off his shoulders onto the floor,” Nicholson said. “I once saw a small-town idiot walking across the park, totally drunk, but he was holding an ice cream, staggering, but also concentrating on not allowing the ice cream to fall. I felt there was something similar in Tom.”

Waits, who eventually would go to AA and get sober, likely was able to draw on his own alcoholism for the role. “[O]ne is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own,” he told The Guardian. “And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they’re afraid to find out that it was the liquor talking all along…I was trying to prove something to myself, too. It was like, ‘Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?’”

At this point, Waits began to become highly sought after for film work. He would continue to take on eclectic, eccentric parts, like as a rough-and-tumble bush pilot in the 1991 drama At Play In the Fields of The Lord and an uncredited role as a disabled veteran in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. “He was a friend of Jeff Bridges, basically,” Gilliam said. “[Bridges] said, ‘You ought to meet Tom.’ It’s funny because when I met him and even in the course of making the film, I’d never heard a Tom Waits record. I’d never listened to them at all. I just met him and liked him immediately. So into the film he went, and he was great. The studio was trying to cut him out. They felt it wasn’t advancing the narrative in any significant way so they thought that was things that could go. They were totally wrong.”

In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola made a play to save his struggling American Zoetrope studio with a lush adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The gothic costume drama gave Coppola and Waits an excuse to work together again, with Waits taking on the role of bug-eating madman Renfield. It was a distinctly un-cool part for Waits, yet he manages to steal almost every scene he’s in. He rants, he raves, he wears bizarre metal devices on his hands. Yet there’s a distinct humanity underneath the over-the-top madness, such as a scene where Waits’ Renfield disobeys his master Dracula to warn Winona Ryder’s Mina that she’s in danger. “Got to have a really meaningful scene with Winona Ryder. Not how I imagined it would be, though. Bug juice dripping from the corners of my mouth. Unshaven. Totally gray. Screaming behind bars. Not how I saw our scene together. But I tried to rise above it,” he told Image magazine.

At this point in his career, Waits was aging gracefully beyond his hipster youth into his 40s, in a sense turning into the older-seeming, more lived-in man his songs portrayed. In Robert Altman’s 1993 Short Cuts, adapted from the works of Raymond Carver, Waits plays a washed-up version of the younger, cooler individuals he had excelled at. He’s aging, alcoholic limo driver Earl, married to waitress Doreen (Lily Tomlin). “He seemed like someone I knew very well on a soul level,” Tomlin told The A.V. Club. “We did one thing I recall that would never read on camera: We ‘tattooed’ on our hands, at the base of the right thumb, the image of half a heart and when I’d pass him at the counter, we’d touch that part of each hand to the other and he’d say under his breath, ‘’Til the wheels come off.’” Waits also went method for the role, according to Tomlin: “Tom called me the first night after shooting, in his character of ‘Earl’ and spent maybe half an hour talking to me as ‘Doreen,’ as he supposedly drove around in the limo, which was Earl’s job. Tom did that for two or three more nights after work. Thinking he’d never do it again, I never was prepared to tape him and, each time he called, he was nothing if not filled with poetry as Earl.”

From there, Waits’ roles only grew more and more bizarre. He had wondered, “Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?” around the time he quit drinking, but now he seemed to be firmly entering the “funny hat” zone of his acting career. In Mystery Men, he plays an inventor of non-lethal weapons who spends his free time trying to pick up women at nursing homes; in Domino, he appears as an exposition-dumping character known only as the Wanderer; Wristcutters: A Love Story finds him as commune leader in the afterlife; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus reunited him with Terry Gilliam again to play the devil himself; and Seven Psychopaths had him playing a serial killer who loves rabbits.

The older Waits gets, the more he seems comfortable playing such wild weirdos. Perhaps he’s always been comfortable growing into that weirdness. Waits’ musical career was filled with sea change. He went from the lonely-heart, tears-in-my-beer crooning of his earlier albums to the banging-on-a-trashcan hullabaloo of 1983’s Swordfishtrombones. In 1999, Waits released Mule Variations, an album that, according to Rolling Stone, “rounded up his multiple personalities—barfly poet, avant-garde storyteller, family guy” into one place. Those multiple personalities spilled over into his acting career as well.

Waits is known for intriguing and eccentric choices as a musician —and that’s a recognition that should bleed over into his acting career. “I think most singers, when they start out, are doing really bad impersonations of other singers that they admire,” Waits once told NPR. “You kind of evolve into your voice. Or maybe your voice is out there, waiting for you to grow up.” For Waits, changing and evolving was like second nature. “The person that I saw changed every year,” said music producer and Waits friend Dayton “Bones” Howe. “His philosophy was, if I keep being a moving target, I can’t get hit. He never wanted to be the same again in any way.”

[Note: This essay is the first in a two-part series on 3D. Part 2, coming soon, will discuss the unexpected peak of 3D as an artistic form. —ed.]

It’s not fair to say that James Cameron ruined projection standards by pushing for a digital changeover—the industry impetus was already under way—but Avatar left less of an impression as a movie than as technological advocacy, resulting in unintended, still-lingering side effects. Cameron dreamed of 3D cinema arriving, finally, at what he viewed as its overdue narrative fruition; he couldn’t have imagined compromising projection standards or undermining film archiving in the process. This is a two-part essay: The first is a grim recap of the Third Wave of 3D, which has unfolded over the last decade. The second will advocate for a secret classic of 3D cinema at its inadvertently experimental peak.

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The not-too-reductive standard narrative goes like this: 3D was popularized contemporaneously with widescreen in the ‘50s as half of a two-pronged initiative to lure audiences away from their TV screens by giving the theatrical experience something unavailable at home. By decade’s end, widescreen was normalized; ’60s and ‘70s one-offs excepted, 3D wasn’t. 1980’s Comin’ at Ya! kicked off its second wave, which had a similarly short lifespan. In both runs, 3D failed to transition from passing gimmick to standard filmmaking option, mostly due to the diminishing thrill of seeing things flying at you, but also due to technological flaws that made the results physically difficult to watch. This history’s a bit of an oversimplification: like sound, color, and widescreen (all of which were experimented with long before they became standard options), 3D had test-run incarnations well before its ‘50s boom. Still, this story is largely accurate. So what makes the third wave different?

Cameron’s ideal 3D would be to create totally immersive worlds, refusing to throw objects at viewers the way the first two 3D waves had done. These effects were presumably cheap grabs for attention, while Cameron was focused more on depth rather than breaking the proscenium. In a (troublesomely unattributed) quote from 2009, a collaborator summed up his approach: “There’s a scene early in [Avatar] where something jumps out of the screen. Jim said, `I just did that so that they would know I know how to do it. But then I stopped doing it because that’s not what 3D is; 3D is bringing the audience completely into the environment of the movie.’” Narrative disruption was not on the agenda; Cameron’s films have always followed conventional dramatic arcs, and Avatar has a particularly unchallenging (“archetypal”) story. This meant yoking 3D to digital projection, which would straighten out the format’s numerous problems once and for all by eliminating both the visual eyestrain and eyeline problems of watching 3D, either polarized (the default standard until digital) or in anaglyph (the infamous red-and-blue glasses format that became a stand-in image for the format, despite being relatively rare) and the double potential for error caused by an incompetent projectionist. Cameron had spent years preparing audiences—and, more importantly, the industry—for a digital conversion. In 2005, he, George Lucas, and Peter Jackson appeared at ShoWest, the trade theater convention to boost for 3D and, by association, digital projection. “I’m giving you guys plenty of warning,” Cameron said. “You’ve got two years to get ready.” His timeline was off, the larger idea was not: In 2009, 16,000 screens worldwide were digital-ready. The next year, that had shot up to 36,000.

It’s not clear digital projection is the optimal way to see Avatar; the late 3D advocate Ray Zone saw the film five times in multiple formats in its first run, concluding not only that film-based IMAX 3D (with two 70mm projectors running simultaneously) was the correct way to see the film, but that “One hint that IMAX 3-D 15/70mm was the native 3-D format for Avatar was that the new large platters would only hold two hours and forty minutes of 15/70mm film—the exact running time of the film.” Nonetheless, Avatar’s overwhelming success sped up a slow-moving push to digital conversion, which the industry had been inching towards for some time. George Lucas had some digital screenings of Phantom Menace, but locally, I remember digital first rearing its head at the arthouse—specifically Austin’s long-closed four-screen Dobie Theatre, an independent that had by then been bought by Landmark Theatres. The arthouse chain went in early for digital projectors, a bright future ushered in Windows Media Player 9. (From a press release at the time: “The film is a milestone in digital origination — a genuine work of art that takes full advantage of new technology. Windows Media 9 Series will show it in all its glory.”) “We can hear the techies in the crowd oohing and ahhing already,” The Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov wrote. “It’ll only be a matter of time before the entire industry goes digital and the notion of scratched and blotchy film and frazzled frame adjustments will seem very quaint indeed. Progress, baby. We live for it.” My first screening in that format was Russian Ark, Alexander Sokruov’s one-take Hermitage film that would have been impossible to realize on celluloid, with its inherent time limits on how long each reel can be. That projection (the Dobie was only one of four US theaters to play it that way in the film’s initial run) made sense: digital in, digital out.

Still, the stakes of first digital conversion were relatively small; Avatar’s success upped digital’s presence significantly while coupling it to 3D. This is the part that’s different: where previous pushes for 3D worked with (extensively) modified versions of existing film hardware, this time the medium’s perfection accelerated the wholesale rethinking of film production and exhibition. Striking and shipping 35mm prints was expensive, as was paying qualified projectionists, and said prints would get beat up; the longer you waited to see a film, odds were the worse it would look. And “qualified” projectionists certainly weren’t the baseline standard by any means: I remember going to see Talk to Her improperly projected in 2002, the frame misaligned so that the bottom of the frame showed as a sliver at the top from start to finish. (Here’s a much more dramatic projection fail story from back in the day; probably everyone has at least one.) As with any new tech rollout, unforeseen problems followed: smaller theaters crowdsourced funds for new projectors or risked going out of business, digital files proved anything but foolproof in practice, a push for digital archiving placed the history of film at risk as new storage formats proved highly unstable relative to well-preserved film. (This last sentence is a heavily compressed version of what David Bordwell tracked at length in his highly recommended “Pandora’s Digital Box” series.) More succinctly, this is the first time 3D introduced a specific ghost in the machine: every time you go to a multiplex to see a movie that looks way too dark, the odds are good someone left the 3D lens on, and no one’s around who can fix it or who would even care to. What started as an attempt to perfect 3D had the inadvertent effect of undoing 2D digital projection standards.

Again, none of this is directly James Cameron’s fault. He’s just the one who helped push through a change faster than it might have been implemented otherwise. Avatar’s blockbuster breakthrough was followed the next year by Alice in Wonderland, which harvested a billion-plus dollars worldwide, making the case that it didn’t matter whether 3D was native or, as in Tim Burton’s film, post-converted. Not a year later, Jeffrey Katzenberg—another 3D booster—was already worried“the bloom was off the rose” because cynical types “thought they could just deliver a kind of low-end crappy version of it, and people wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t know the difference.” Five years later, Katzenberg was blunter, quoting (intentionally or not) Easy Rider to convey the extent of his disappointment: “we blew it.” 3D’s never had as big a year since 2010: its revenue has declined every year since, and production of 3D films has gone down. The technology stuck, but 3D’s potential as a normative storytelling tool remains once again questionable until further notice.

Setting aside the grim trajectory of 3D’s current wave, which has seen revenue (and audience demand) for the format decrease, it’s worth reflecting on Cameron’s original idea that 3D would add “depth” to the familiar, instead of a better brand of comin-at-ya effects. For years, whenever people would ask which 3D movies I liked, I’d say Yogi Bear. This is (not entirely) a smartass answer: obviously Goodbye to Language would be a better response, but Godard sought to dismantle all 3D’s rules one event shot at a time, and no one will (be able to) follow up on its visual inquiries. Pina made visual sense (the performers are dancing outside, depth is important), Hugo looked neat, and Tron: Legacy was a cool lightshow (though that had more to do with sheer color overload and Daft Punk’s super-loud score as rendered on the biggest speakers theatrically available, and a 3D expert friend swears it has some of the worst use of the medium he’s ever seen); otherwise, my 3D sampling has mostly been review assignments of bad-looking movies. The worst are the post-converted monstrosities. A real low here was the new Pete’s Dragon, which Disney screened in 3D: it looked extremely dark, which was predictable, but worse, a bunch of shots which were clearly shallow-focus, had all been rendered as three to four separate planes of depth, casting blurry background areas in semi-sharp relief, each shot an unintentional diorama. It was sort of possible to tell what the compositional intent was, but impossible to really envision it.

So Yogi Bear is peak 3D. Why not? At a cost of $80 million, Yogi Bear renders a depth-filled Jellystone Park entirely on par with Pandora, with all of the depth and none of the tacky colors. Both movies tell stories, both benefit from depth to spatially reconstruct a largely external environment: the differences are mostly details. In an interview Google will no longer let me find, but which I swear I remember, Cameron said only 19 shots (or thereabouts, let me hedge) in Avatar featured zero CG. These are, I presume, the shots of Jake Sully back on base; to me, they’re easily the most memorable parts of the movie, capturing the full depth of a set (and its metal walls) in a way that’s way more compelling than a fully rendered fake ecosystem . What if Cameron was wrong and 3D is, fundamentally, not just a way to enhance immersiveness but one which, when deployed in the non-CG constructed world, can recode the nuts and bolts of narrative filmmaking visual language itself? In Part II, I’ll look back at the much-derided second wave of ‘80s 3D to make the case that 1983’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, a little-regarded Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off, is one of the format’s greatest, most progressive and inadvertently suggestive moments.

I didn’t expect to spend Thanksgiving Weekend 2018 watching ten 3D movies: marathon viewing is not my favorite experience in general, and I haven’t spent years longing to see, say, Friday the 13th Part III, in 35mm. But a friend was visiting, from Toronto, to take advantage of this opportunity, an impressive level of dedication that seemed like something to emulate, and it’s not like I had anything better to do, so I tagged along. Said friend, Blake Williams, is an experimental filmmaker and 3D expert, a subject to which he’s devoted years of graduate research and the bulk of his movies (see Prototype if it comes to a city near you!); if I was going to choose the arbitrary age of 32 to finally take 3D seriously, I couldn’t have a better Virgil to explain what I was seeing on a technical level. My thanks to him (for getting me out there) and to the Quad Cinema for being my holiday weekend host; it was probably the best possible use of my time.

The 10-movie slate was an abridged encore presentation of this 19-film program, which I now feel like a dink for missing. What’s interesting in both is the curatorial emphasis on films from 3D’s second, theoretically most disreputable wave—‘80s movies with little to zero critical respect or profile. Noel Murray considered a good chunk of these on this site a few years ago, watching the films flat at home, noting that when viewed this way, “the plane-breaking seems all the more superfluous. (It’s also easy to spot when these moments are about to happen, because the overall image gets murkier and blurrier.)” This presumes that if you can perceive the moments where a 3D film expands its depth of field for a comin’-at-ya moment and mentally reconstruct what that would look like, that’s basically the same experience as actually seeing these effects.

Blake’s argument, which I wrestled with all weekend, is that these movies do indeed often look terrible in 2D, but 3D literally makes them better. As it turns out, this is true surprisingly often. Granted, all concerned have to know what they’re doing, otherwise the results will still be indifferent: it turns out that Friday the 13th Part III sucks no matter how you watch it, and 3D’s not a complete cure-all. This was also demonstrated by my first movie, 1995’s barely released Run For Cover, the kind of grade-Z library filler you’d expect to see sometime around 2 am on a syndicated channel. This is, ostensibly, a thriller, in which a TV news cameraman foils a terrorist plot against NYC. It features a lot of talking, scenes of Bondian villains eating Chinese takeout while plotting and/or torturing our ostensible hero, some running (non-Tom Cruise speed levels), and one The Room-caliber sex scene. Anyone who’s spent too much time mindlessly staring at the least promising option on TV has seen many movies like these. The 3D helps a little: an underdressed TV station set takes on heightened diorama qualities, making it interesting to contemplate as an inadvertent installation—the archetypal TV command room, with the bare minimum necessary signifiers in place and zero detail otherwise—rather than simply a bare-bones set. But often the camera is placed nowhere in particular, and the resulting images are negligible; in the absence of dramatic conviction or technical skill, what’s left is never close enough to camp to come back out the other side as inadvertently worthwhile. I’m glad I saw it for the sheer novelty of cameos from Ed Koch, Al Sharpton and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—all doing their usual talking points, but in 3D! But it’s the kind of film that’s more fun to tell people about than actually watch.

But infamous punchlines Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D have their virtues when viewed in 3D. The former, especially, seems to be the default punching bag whenever someone wants to make the case that 3D has, and always will be, nothing but a limited gimmick upselling worthless movies. It was poorly reviewed when it came out, but the public dug it enough to make it, domestically, the 15th highest-grossing film of 1983 (between Never Say Never Again and Scarface) and justify Jaws: The Revenge. Of course I was skeptical; why wouldn’t I be? But I was sucked in by the opening credits, in which the familiar handheld-underwater-cam-as-shark POV gave way to a severed arm floating before a green “ocean.” Maybe flat it looks simply ludicrous, but the image has a compellingly Lynchian quality, as if the limb were detached from one of Twin Peaks: The Return’s more disgusting corpses, its artifice heightened and literally foregrounded, the equally artificial background setting it into greater relief.

The film’s prominent SeaWorld product placement is, theoretically, ill-advised, especially in the post-Blackfish era; in practice, it’s extremely productive. The opening stretches have a lot of water-skiing; in deep 3D, the water-skiers serve as lines tracing depth towards and away from the camera over a body of water whose horizon line stretches back infinitely, producing a greater awareness of space. It reminded me of the early days of the short-lived super-widescreen format Cinerama, as described by John Belton in his academic history book Widescreen Cinema (recommended). The very first film in the format, This is Cinerama, was a travelogue whose stops included Cypress Gardens, Florida’s first commercial tourist theme park (the site is now a Legoland), which has very similar images of waterskiiers. Cinerama was, per the publicist copy Belton quotes from the period, about an experience, not a story: “Plot is replaced by audience envelopment […] the medium forces you to concentrate on something bigger than people, for it has a range of vision and sound that no other medium offers.” Cinerama promised to immerse viewers, as literalized in this delightful publicity image; Belton argues that “unlike 3-D and CinemaScope, which stressed the dramatic content of their story material and the radical new means of technology employed in production, Cinerama used a saturation advertising campaign in the newspapers and on radio to promote the ‘excitement aspects’ of the new medium.” There’s a connection here with the earliest days of silent cinema, short snippets (“actualities”) of reality, before it was decided that medium’s primary purpose was to tell a story. It didn’t have to be like that; in those opening stretches, Jaws 3-D’s lackadaisical narrative, which might play inertly on TV, recalls the 1890s, when shots of bodies of water were popular subjects. This is something I learned from a recent presentation by silent film scholar Bryony Dixon, and her reasoning makes sense. The way water moves is inherently hypnotic, and for early audiences assimilating their very first moving images, water imagery was a favorite subject. It’s only with a few years under its belt that film started making its drift towards narrative as default; inadvertently or not, Jaws 3-D is very pure in its initial presentation of water as a spectacular, non-narrative event.

If this seems like a lot of cultural and historical weight to bring to bear upon Jaws 3-D, note that it wasn’t even my favorite of the more-scorned offerings I saw that weekend, merely one that makes it easiest for me to articulate what I found compelling about the 3D immersion experience. I haven’t described the plot of Jaws 3-D at all, which is indeed perfunctory (though it was nice to learn where Deep Blue Sea cribbed a bunch of its production design from). I won’t try to rehabilitate Amityville 3-D at similar length: set aside the moronic ending and Tony Roberts’ leading turn as one of cinema’s most annoyingly waspish, unearnedly whiny divorcees, and what’s left is a surprisingly melancholy movie about the frustrations, and constant necessary repairs, of home ownership. There’s very little music and a surprising amount of silence. The most effective moment is simply Roberts going upstairs to the bathroom, where steam is hissing out for no apparent reason and he has to fix the plumbing. The camera’s planted in the hallway, not moving for any kind of emphasis as the back wall moves closer to Roberts; it doesn’t kill him and nothing comes of it, it’s just another problem to deal with (the walls, as it were, are settling), made more effective by awareness of how a space whose rules and boundaries seemed fixed is being altered, pushing air at you.

Watching a bunch of these in sequence, some clear lessons emerge: if you want to generate compelling depth by default, find an alleyway and block off the other half of the frame with a wall to present two different depths, or force protagonists to crawl through ducts or tubes. This is a good chunk of Silent Madness, a reasonably effective slasher film that, within the confines of its cheap sets and functional plotting, keeps the eye moving. It’s an unlikely candidate for a deep-dive New York Times Magazine article from the time period, which is well worth reading in full. It’s mostly about B-movies and the actresses trying to make their way up through them, though it does have this money quote from director Simon Nuchtern about why, for Bs, it’s not worth paying more for a good lead actress: “If I had 10,000 extra dollars, I’d put it into lights. Not one person is going to say, ‘Go see that movie because Lynn Redgrave is in it.’ But if we don’t have enough lights and that 3-D doesn’t pop right out at you, people are going to say, ‘Don’t see that movie because the 3-D stinks.’” Meanwhile, nobody appears to have been thinking that hard while making Friday the 13th: Part III, which contains precisely one striking image: a pan, street morning, as future teen lambs-to-the-slaughter exit their van and walk over to a friend’s house. A lens flare hits frame left, making what’s behind it briefly impossible to see: this portion of the frame is now sealed off under impermeable 2D, in contrast to the rest of the frame’s now far-more-tangible depth. The remainder of the movie makes it easy to imagine watching it on TV and clocking every obvious, poorly framed and blocked 3D effect, from spears being thrown at the camera to the inevitable yo-yo descending at the lens. (This is my least favorite 3D effect because it’s just too obvious and counterproductively makes me think of the Smothers Brothers.)

Friday the 13th was the biggest slog of the 3D weekend, and the one most clearly emulating 1981’s Comin’ at Ya! I am not going to argue for that movie, either, which is generally credited with kicking off the second 3D craze; it’s a sludgy spaghetti western that delivers exactly as its title promises, using a limited number of effects repeatedly before showing them all again in a cut-together montage at the end, lest you missed one in its first iteration. It’s exhausting and oddly joyless, but was successful enough to generate a follow-up from the same creative team. Star Tony Anthony and director Ferdinando Baldi (both veterans of second-tier spaghetti westerns) re-teamed for 1983’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, the movie which (two screenings in) rewired my brain a little and convinced me I should hang around all weekend. This is not a well-respected film, then or now: judging by IMDb user comments, most people who remember seeing it recall it playing endlessly on HBO in the ‘80s, where it did not impress them unless they were very young (and even then, perhaps not). Janet Maslin admitted to walking out on it in her review; then again, she did the same with Dawn of the Dead, and everyone loves that.

An unabashed Indiana Jones copy, Treasure begins strong with a lengthy opening sequence of tomb raider J.T. Striker (Anthony) dropping into a cave, where he’s promptly confronted not only with a bunch of traps but, for a long stretch, a small menagerie’s worth of owls, dogs, and other wildlife. There are a lot of animals, and why not? They’re fun to look at, and having them trotted out, one after another, is another link back to silent cinema; besides water, babies and animals were also popular subjects. The whole sequence ends with Striker running away from the castle above the cave, artifact retrieved, in slow-motion as Ennio Morricone’s score blares. There is, inevitably and nonsensically, a fireball that consumes the set; it unfolds luxuriously in detailed depth, the camera placed on a grassy knoll that gives us a nice angle to contemplate it looking upwards, a nearly abstract testament to the pleasures of gasoline-fueled imagery. Shortly thereafter, Striker is in some European city to sell his wares, and in every shot the camera is placed for maximum depth: in front of a small city park’s mini-waterfall, views of streets boxed in by sidewalks that narrow towards each other, each position calibrated to create a spectacular travelogue out of what’s a fairly mundane location. There’s an expository sequence where Striker and friends drop into a diner to ask about the whereabouts of another member of the crew they need to round up. Here, with the camera on one side of a bar encircling a center counter, there are something like six layers of cleanly articulated space, starting with a plant’s leaves right in front of the lens on the side, proceeding to the counter, center area, back counter, back tables and walls of the establishment. Again, the location is mundane; seeing it filleted in space so neatly is what makes it special.

The climax finally convinced me I was watching forgotten greatness. This is an elaborate heist sequence in which, of course, the floor cannot be touched, necessitating that the team perform all kinds of rappelling foolishness. At this point I thought, “the only way I could respect this movie more is if it spent 10 minutes watching them get from one side of the room to another in real time.” First, the team has to gear up, which basically means untangling a bunch of ropes—clearly not the most exciting activity. The camera is looking up, placed below a team member as they uncoil and then drop a rope towards the lens. This is a better-framed variant of the comin’-at-ya principle, but what made it exciting to me was the leisurely way it was done: no more whizzing spears, but a moment of procedural mundanity as exciting as any ostensible danger. Basic narrative film grammar is being upended here: if a rope being dropped is just as exciting as a big, fake rip-off boulder chasing our hero down the cave, then all the rules about what constitutes narrative are off—narrative and non-narrative elements have the exact same weight, and even the most mundane, A-to-B connective shot is a spectacular event.

This isn’t how narrative cinema is supposed to work, and certainly not what James Cameron’s conception of good 3D proposed. The movie keeps going, building to a bizarrely grim climax involving a lot of face-melting, scored by Morricone’s oddly beatific score, which seems serenely indifferent to the grotesqueness of the images it’s accompanying. (This is a recurring trait in the composer’s ‘80s work; the score for White Dog often seems to bear no relation to the footage it’s accompanying.) That would make the movie oneiric and weirdly compelling even on a flat TV, but everything preceding convinced me: 3D can be great because it’s 3D, not because it serves a story. I’ve spent the last decade getting more angry about the format than anything, but that was a misunderstanding. Treasure of the Four Crowns is, yes, probably very unexceptional seen flat; seen in all three dimensions, it’s a demonstration of how 3D can turn banal connective tissue and routine coverage into an event. The spectacle of 3D might never have been its potential to make elaborate CG landscapes more immersive, something I still haven’t personally been convinced of; as those 19 non-CG shots in Avatar showed (undermining Cameron’s own argument!), 3D’s renderings of the real, material world and objects have yet to be fully explored. 3D’s ability to link film back to its earliest days is refreshing, in the way that any rediscovery of forgotten parts of film language can be, while also encouraging thought about all the things narrative visual language hasn’t yet explored, as if 3D could take us forwards and backwards simultaneously. In any case, I’m now won over—ten years after Avatar, but better late than never.

“Dirty” Harry Callahan fought many bad guys across five films between the years 1971 and 1988, from a serial killer named Scorpio to violent revolutionaries to a gang of seaside rapists. But one of his most persistent foes lived off screen, which didn’t keep her from becoming a kind of obsession for the film series Harry called home. Directed by Don Siegel, Dirty Harry quickly became the subject of controversy and condemnation — as everyone making it no doubt knew it would, with its casual endorsement of police power and dismissal of accused criminals’ rights. But few were as vocal in their condemnation as Pauline Kael, who pinned on the series, and its star, an f-word both would have a hard time shaking. The “action genre has always had a fascist potential,” wrote Kael in The New Yorker, “and it has finally surfaced.” The review locked Callahan and Kael in a battle that would continue until both retired, leaving no clear winner at its end.

Dirty Harry appeared in the midst of a season of worry over on-screen violence, a season reflected in Kael’s reviews. In the previous issue of the New Yorker, she reviewed A Clockwork Orange, the latest film from Stanley Kubrick, a director to whom she was never especially sympathetic. Kael expressed great concern that it was part of a trend toward desensitizing viewers to violence and preemptively batting away charges of censorship, writing “[S]urely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it’s worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what’s in it.” In the issue published after her Dirty Harry pan, she’d run a complex, conflicted review of Straw Dogs, a film by Sam Peckinpah, a director Kael championed in print (and had befriended in person). She praised its filmmaking and even, up to a point, the aesthetics of its infamous rape scene. And though she specifically sets it apart from Dirty Harry, she can’t help but expressing her fear that “Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with Straw Dogs, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art.”

But, hey, at least it’s art, right? As for Dirty Harry, Kael had no such measured kindness, apart from admitting it’s a “stunningly well-made genre piece.” Under the headline “Saint Cop,” Kael attempted something between an analysis and a dismantling of the film. After some memories of growing up in San Francisco and being told to avoid the police, she states, “Dirty Harry is not about the actual San Francisco police force; it’s about a right-wing fantasy of that police force as a group helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals.” That’s just a build-up to a review that largely pushes the film’s aesthetic qualities to the side to attack what she perceived to be its one-sided morality. Kael took particular objection to the stacked deck narrative of a script (credited to the husband and wife team of Harry Frink and R.M. Frink and Dean Reisner, though John Milius, Terrence Malick, and others also took uncredited passes) that ignores the complicated causes of criminality in favor of a simplistic clash between good and evil that blames irresponsible bleeding heart liberals with their Miranda rights and concerns about unchecked police brutality getting in the way of justice.

In some respects, she’s not wrong. That is the story of Dirty Harry, at least on the surface. It’s the easiest way to read the film and, undoubtedly, the preferred reading of many of its fans. It’s the fantasy of a handsome, straight white guy trying to bring law and order to a city increasingly filled with people who don’t look like him or share his beliefs or sexual preferences. What’s more, the film’s almost laughable in the way it tries to anticipate and deflate concerns about that fantasy. Harry has a Latino partner and, after taking down an African-American bank robber* in the film’s famous “Do you feel lucky?” scene, he’s immediately shown getting stitched up by an African-American doctor established as an old family friend.

But to be fully on Kael’s side requires focusing on the surface while ignoring what the film is up to elsewhere, and the ways it questions and undermines its central fantasy. Both Siegel and Eastwood are fully aware of the star’s iconic power and frequently use it to morally ambiguous effect. Rewind again to that “Do you feel lucky scene?” It appears just over 10 minutes into the movie, after the dedication to the SFPD officers slain in the line of duty and after the film has introduced the two men who will drive it. We first meet Scorpio (played as a psychopath in hippie garb by Andrew Robinson) targeting and killing a rooftop swimmer using a sniper rifle, establishing San Francisco in the opening moments as a place where evil can strike anywhere and take out anyone. We then see Harry visiting the scene of the crime and looking up to where the shot must have originated. The film has a hero and a villain, but the moments leading up to the film’s most famous line reveals the set-up to be a little more more complicated.

The scene begins simply enough, with Harry trying to get a quick bite at a regular haunt (a hot dog joint conveniently located around the corner from a theater playing Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me). But Harry can’t eat in peace. There’s a tan Ford with its engine running outside a bank and he knows it’s up to no good. So he asks the proprietor to call the police and plans to lay back and relax—until the alarms start blaring. His hand is on his gun before he’s out the door, and it’s no standard-issue pistol, either, as he’ll soon explain, but a .44 Magnum, a gun originally designed for short-range hunting. A gunfight breaks out. Harry takes down one of the robbers as he tries to make it to the getaway car. A second one makes it, but Harry then shoots the driver as he tries to flee, forcing the car to swerve and hit a fire hydrant then flip on its side. More gunfire follows, and Harry kills the passenger-side robber after he escapes from the wreckage. It’s Harry’s first target, the sole survivor, who’ll be on the receiving end of his monologue about what a .44 Magnum can do to a man’s head.

But before the speech, there’s the walk. Harry, still chewing his hot dog, looks down and sees a spot of blood on his pants form a flesh wound. Then, as water shoots in the air and witnesses scream in horror, he strides over to the bank, gun at his side. It’s a gunslinger’s walk, and though Dirty Harry will change that, up to this point Eastwood has been best known as a Western actor. The first of his five collaborations with Siegel, 1968’s Coogan’s Bluff, was as much Western as police thriller, and the pair double down on that imagery here. Only everything about the moment seems wrong. Here’s a lawman administering justice from behind the barrel of a powerful gun, like an old-fashioned Western hero (even if Eastwood rarely played that type of Western hero). But he’s out of place in modern San Francisco, and those screams around him could just as easily be at the horror of what he’s done as the the fear that the criminals will carry the day.

It’s also the rare scene in which Siegel chooses not to utilize Lalo Schifrin’s score, which he’ll employ to tremendous effect elsewhere, and often to make Harry’s actions seem as horrific as they are heroic. When Harry arrests Scorpio after shooting him in the middle of Kezar Stadium (then recently abandoned by the San Francisco 49ers), he first shoots him in the leg then tortures him by stepping on his wound, demanding he reveal the location of a girl he’s kidnapped while Scorpio pleads for his life and writhes in pain. On the soundtrack, Schifrin’s music sounds like it could just as easily accompany a horror movie. Then, in an extraordinary helicopter shot, the camera pulls back and offer’s a God’s eye view of the fog enshrouded-stadium. From a distance, it’s hard to see who’s the cop and who’s the criminal, only that some horrific bit of abuse is happening. And then both fade from view.

Harry’s right. Because Harry’s always right. Scorpio snivels and whines but the girl dies anyway. And then Scorpio gets away because Harry has mistreated him. “People were angry with a certain erosion of justice, erosion of a sense of the law protecting them,” Milius says in the documentary The Long Shadow of Dirty Harry. The film ultimately feeds into that anger, but in that moment at least, it’s hard not to wonder if justice that’s this ugly is really justice at all.

***

Kael felt otherwise, seeing no ambiguity and writing, “Dirty Harry is not one of those ambivalent, you-can-read-it-either-way jobs, like The French Connection.” Others, like Time’s Jay Cocks, who noted that “both cop and killer are renegades outside society, isolated in combat in their own brutal world,” disagreed. But Kael’s review remained an inextricable part of the discussion around the film, and around Eastwood, for whom she could never spare a kind word. And it seemed to stick in Eastwood’s craw, too. In response to a later swipe in which she called him “the reductio ad absurdum of macho today” he claimed to a Los Angeles Times gossip columnist to have had a psychiatrist analyze Kael’s reviews. The shrink’s discovery: “Kael actually feels 180 degrees the opposite of what she says and that often a man or woman obsessed with preaching great morality is more interested in amorality.” In 1977, he wrote a letter to Village Voice critic (and Kael nemesis Andrew Sarris) thanking him for a sympathetic piece, making a case for the complexity of his politics which Eastwood saw as neither wholly liberal nor conservative, and, again, referencing Kael’s original pan. “Try a change of pace,” Eastwood wrote, “and do a film (Dirty Harry) about concern for the victim instead of the accused and POW!, Kael screams ‘fascism,’ somebody else screams ‘Hitler,’ and several other publications have Don Siegel and myself to the right of Atilla the Hun—hardly compassionate or understanding.”

Then there’s the phone call. In his 1996 biography Clint Eastwood, critic and Eastwood pal Richard Schickel recounts a conversation Eastwood claims to have had with Kael in which she admitted she was “just a dumpy little movie critic, and I have to do that,” after admitting she wrote things she didn’t really mean. Schickel takes the claim at face value. Eastwood’s erstwhile partner Sondra Locke, on the other hand, claims he made the whole thing up.

Whichever the case (and the latter seems far more plausible than the former), the second Dirty Harry film, scripted by Milius and Michael Cimino and directed by Ted Post, often plays like an answer to Kael. The enemy in 1973’s Magnum Force—in addition to a sadistic pimp and other urban menaces—is a band of actual fascist cops, eerily polite, immaculately groomed, and led by Hal Holbrook, who use deadly, extra-legal force to stop crime in its tracks, much to Harry’s horror. “You want to see fascism?,” the film seems to ask. “Here’s what actual fascism looks like.”

Kael didn’t bite and sensed she was being pandered to. “They are explicit versions of what we accused Harry of being,” she wrote. “They might be the earlier Harry’s disciples.” Rather than unpack the politics further, she instead revived her complaints about the original film, threw barbs at Eastwood’s acting, (“the first truly stoned hero in the history of movies”) and his general presence (“only his hands seem fully alive”), and worried some more about the state of movie violence.

If she found too little complexity in Dirty Harry, however, it’s hard to say the same about Magnum Force, which suffers from the absence of Siegel and the pedestrian direction of TV veteran Post (though Post would later complain that Eastwood’s interference prevented him from making the film he wanted). An unsettling, morally ambiguous Dirty Harry proved far more compelling than one who seemed neutered by criticism. Ditto the Harry of The Enforcer (1976), which benefits from a relationship between Harry and his new female partner (played by Tyne Daly), but otherwise continues the series’ descent, particularly in a scene that plays Harry’s propensity to shoot first and destroy property to comic effect. Harry bounced back considerably with the Eastwood-directed Sudden Impact (1983), which returned the series to its roots, for better and worse, via scenes of queasy-making violence against black criminals and added a layer of sexual psychodrama via a female vigilante (Locke) seeking revenge on the rapists who put her sister in a coma years before. It’s an odd film that mixes De Palma-like luridness with silly moments of comic relief (usually in the form of a farting bulldog), but also the one entry that justifies Eastwood retrieving the badge Harry discards at the end of the original from the San Francisco Bay.

****

The same can’t be said of 1988’s The Dead Pool, which brings the Harry/Eastwood saga to its conclusion in the stupidest way possible. In the years after Magnum Force, Kael had refrained from writing about the Dirty Harry films beyond dismissive capsule reviews, and she had written dismissively of Eastwood’s directorial efforts. (The Gauntlet: “You look at the screen even though there’s nothing to occupy your mind.” Pale Rider: “a bust” Bird: “When a man who isn’t an artist makes an art film, it’s just what they expect art to be: earnest and lifeless.”) “She considered it a sign,” Brian Kellow writes in his biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, “of the way movies had gone off track that Martin Scorsese was now (she believed) in decline, and Robert Altman was all but a back number—yet Eastwood’s star remained as potent as ever.” Eastwood had no reason to grow fonder of her, or to keep her from being slain by a serial killer.

Fictionally, of course. Scripted by Steve Sharon and directed by Eastwood’s former stunt double Buddy Van Horn, The Dead Pool finds Harry tracking a killer who’s somehow related to a new slasher film being filmed in town by loutish, ponytailed horror veteran Peter Swan (Liam Neeson) and starring drugged-out rock star Johnny Squares (Jim Carrey).** Also involved, a “dead pool” game in which the participants predict which celebrity will die next. The list includes both Harry, now a local celebrity, and a San Francisco film critic named Molly Fisher (Ronnie Claire Edwards), who bears more than a passing resemblance to Kael.

First briefly glimpsed joylessly panning a comedy on local television, Fisher exists mostly to look like Kael and to die at the hands of an unseen killer who shows up and menaces her with a knife. “Please,” she gasps. “I have a heart condition.” “A critic with a heart,” he replies. “That’s a laugh.” Asked her honest opinion about Swan’s films, she says, “I… I like them.” In her last moment, she does what Eastwood claimed Kael had told him she did, tailoring her opinion for her audience. The killer calls Fisher a liar and stabs her to death.

It’s the cheapest of shots, but it barely lands in the midst of its dull surroundings. The Dead Pool is an awful movie, one with only a passing resemblance to the film that made Dirty Harry famous and little to set it part from a dozen anonymous ‘80s crime thrillers apart from some alarming low points, like a silly chase between a police cruiser and a remote controlled car. Harry ended his career a shadow of his former self, with everything that once made him seem dangerous or provocative drained away.  

So who got the last laugh? It’s a tough call. Her Parkinson’s disease worsening, Kael retired in 1991, before she got a chance to comment on Eastwood’s further uptick in respectability in the ‘90s, a shift in opinion that began in earnest with the release of Unforgiven, a 1992 Western that explores violence and its relationship with the character of America, and which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. But would Eastwood, who had nothing left to prove as a movie star as the ‘80s became the ‘90s, have pushed himself as an artist quite as hard without the doubts of Kael and others echoing in his head? And while Kael’s Dirty Harry review can be read as an example of Kael’s difficulty in engaging with certain types of movies and their stars—in spite of her habit championing disreputable art she uses “genre” in the piece like it’s a dirty word — it also exemplifies the passionate engagement and cutting observations that made her the most influential critic of her era, one who knew that movies mattered and the fantasies they beamed back to us didn’t always reflect well on those watching. The hammer of Harry’s gun clicks on an empty chamber and the punk’s head doesn’t get blown clean off, but would audiences have cheered or revolted if it had? Both the film and its sharpest critic seem united in not knowing the answer, and justifiably fearing it.

* Played by an uncredited Albert Popwell, who’d have major supporting roles as different characters in the first three Dirty Harry sequels.

** Yes, seeing both of those actors in those roles is pretty strange, almost as strange as when Carrey performs a “Squares” song by lip-synching to “Welcome to the Jungle.” A young Patricia Clarkson plays Harry’s love interest, too.

It was morning in Paris when news of Agnès Varda’s death reached the world. On a hunch, I left the apartment I shared with my girlfriend in the city’s 5th arrondissement and walked the 30 minutes, past the hordes of tourists cramming into the skull-stacked Paris Catacombs, to reach Rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse neighborhood, where Varda had lived since 1951.

This is where Varda and her husband, fellow French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Demy, had purchased a derelict pink storefront and turned it into the production house Tamaris Films, later renamed Ciné-Tamaris, so they could produce Varda’s first film La Pointe Courte in 1954. The pair moved into the tucked-away apartment/studio complex and quickly became fixtures of the neighborhood, spreading art, whimsy, and cats around their tiny world (although the building’s exterior remained in poor shape, with paint perpetually peeling and the roof leaking). For the next nearly seven decades, Varda sightings on Rue Daguerre were an everyday occurrence: “the funny little woman in the red-and-white hair,” as one Parisian described her to me. It was fitting that Varda had inherited the spirit of this street from its original namesake Louis Daguerre: inventor of the daguerreotype, the first commercially available form of photographic imagery and the predecessor to the medium that Varda changed forever.

So Ciné-Tamaris seemed like the natural spot for a spontaneous Varda memorial. I arrived around 2:30 and a small crowd was beginning to gather, much of them reporters like myself, prowling the block for grieving soundbites. Flowers and handwritten notes already lined the sidewalk. Occasionally someone, usually a woman, would gingerly approach the display bearing flowers of their own; the person would pace along the length of the building for a few minutes, searching for the ideal spot, and then kneel down to place their offering among the others, so that it was visible but not too ostentatious.

Sometimes a person would reach the entrance of Varda’s sacred place and, instead of leaving flowers, ring the doorbell; immediately a young man or woman would answer the door, size up the greeter to determine if they were a close relation, and then beckon them inside, and you could make out just a glimpse of the entryway, the same one that all the lucky folks who interviewed Varda here over the years love to describe, with the prowling cats and the assorted found objects and the maze of different rooms connected by that entryway.

Others were drawn to the crowd but didn’t know what had brought us all here. “What’s going on?” one man asked me, and I answered that Agnès Varda had died. He gave a blank look; no idea who that was. I tried to explain, with my horrible French, that she was a famous Nouvelle Vague filmmaker, one of the last of her generation, but this too prompted no reaction. So I named the first title that came to my mind, which also seemed the most likely one for a Frenchman unfamiliar with the Nouvelle Vague to have seen – “Visages Villages” (Faces Places), the quirky 2017 documentary she had made with the muralist JR, in which the two had toured the countryside making art installations out of the folks they met in small French towns. It was a surprise worldwide hit, although it divided hardcore cinephiles I knew, some of whom thought the film was too cutesy and JR too posturing. At any rate, the man didn’t recognize the name. But he solemnly nodded all the same, to show he recognized someone monumental had passed, and that seemed enough, and he went on.

JR, as it happened, was presenting a massive new art installation at the Louvre that weekend. He’d covered the entire expanse of the museum’s outdoor Pyramide structure with his trademark screen-printed tarp to create an optical illusion of it rising out of a deep ravine. The effect was short-lived. Within 24 hours the tarp was being ripped up, both intentionally and not, by tourists, reminiscent of the scene in Faces Places where JR pastes a photo of Varda’s friend Guy Bourdin onto the side of a beach bunker and the tide washes it away.

Unlike her very young cohort, who often creates tactile public displays he knows will fade from view in short time, Varda herself was committed to something like the opposite: using her camera to make impermanent things permanent, to capture unusual people and their dissonant dreams on film before they faded away for good.

***

Another passerby, an older woman, was a longtime neighbor of Varda, having lived on Rue Daguerre for decades. She would see the filmmaker around all the time, she said. She most fondly recalled Varda’s 1975 documentary Daguerréotypes, in which she wandered her own street interviewing various shopkeepers and artisans, with a camera and microphone tethered back to her own house. Varda was interested in not only what these folks did for a living, but also what brought them to Paris and what they dreamt about at night. It was the ultimate “good neighbor” act, and also a convenient way for Varda to try to keep up her filmmaking output while raising young children at home.

The artisans of the type Varda profiled 44 years ago—the perfume maker, the magician, the accordion seller—have all but vanished from Rue Daguerre. And though Daguerréotypes never deviates from its pleasantly curious tone to reflect on their vanishing ranks, Varda seemed to be aware even when she was making the film that they were not long for this world. The artisan was a dying, hopelessly outclassed breed in Paris, a city that’s embraced mass-market goods and priced-out real estate like any other. Perhaps, as many critics smarter than I have noted, Varda saw a kinship in her neighbors because she, too, had devoted her life to a craft with no obvious commercial future, one that struck many outside observers as fundamentally useless.

Of all the commerce on the street today, including a comics vendor and a vegan bakery, I honed in on the most Daguerréotypes-like operation: a tiny frame shop with chipped, weathered exteriors, run by an older woman who kept the front door locked even during business hours. She opened the door for me, but when I asked her if she’d ever heard of Agnès Varda, she gave me the same blank look the man on the street had. “No, sorry,” she said, and shut it again.

Yet there was hope that Varda’s impact will be felt on generations of creative people to come. A young Parisian film student named Valentine brought a carton of seven potatoes to her house. Bending down, Valentine took out a Sharpie and scrawled one letter on each vegetable: “A-G-N-È-S.” She drew a heart on a sixth potato and laid it on top of the others, carefully propping up this tableau in the carton against the wall. The seventh potato was already shaped like a heart, and this one she let stand on its own.

Valentine had been sobbing as she did her work, but she soon grew excited to explain what she’d done. The potatoes, she said, were a tribute to Varda’s 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I, which was the first of her films that Valentine had seen and the one that made her want to make her own. In the movie, Varda had befriended various gleaners across the French countryside, communities of people who scoop up the leftover yield of a crop once it’s been abandoned by the commercial harvesters. More gleaners prowl urban centers looking for discarded food, clothes, and other scraps of life.

A rubber boots-clad dumpster diver proclaims people are “stupid” for throwing so much food away, but Varda’s never been the type to shame an audience. She’s content to open herself up to her subjects’ experiences, to glean what she can from their lives as well as her own (when she trains the camera on her own wrinkled hands and ponders the strangeness of having lived in her skin for so long). There’s a scene where Varda, delighted, gleans her own heart-shaped potatoes and holds them up for the camera: objects which no one else wanted, but which she has endowed with new purpose and clarity. After that film, “my little potato” became a common expression among the Varda family.

All three ethnographies came at very different stages of Varda’s life. She made Daguerréotypes at age 46, Gleaners at 71, Faces Places at 88. But they all concerned Varda’s efforts to ingratiate herself among the people of France, to learn more about life in her country outside of film circles. She was certainly an accomplished crafter of narrative films, as well, but it was with this unplanned trilogy that she enriched her deep bond with fans and ensured her own immortality in the French popular imagination. Besides the obvious fact of Varda’s gender, the strength she derived from simply being around other people might be what most distinguished her from Nouvelle Vague contemporaries like Godard and Truffaut, who only care(d) about the outside world inasmuch as it could be related back to their own vision of cinema. (And in Godard’s case, if that final passage of Faces Places is to be believed, the last one of the originals left standing has become impenetrable to even his oldest friends.)

Varda was 90 when she died, and much of her output at least since Gleaners centered in one way or another on her own impending death. Hell, as far back as 1962’s Cléo From 5 to 7, which centers on a pop star who awaits a possible terminal diagnosis, death and its effect on the everyday has been a major theme of her work. Thus, most of the gleaners now gathering at her residence were in agreement that today’s news, though heartbreaking, did not come as a surprise. But it did surprise Valentine. “I just saw her last week,” she said. Varda had attended the Paris premiere of her last feature, the career retrospective Varda par Agnès, and Valentine’s film class had been there to see her. The film had held its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale in February, perhaps because Varda knew even then she wouldn’t have made it all the way to Cannes in May.

How did she seem, I asked. “She looked very… tired,” one of Valentine’s friends volunteered. And now, a week later, she was gone. “I thought she was eternal,” Valentine said, shaking her head as though she knew how ridiculous that sounded. “I just wanted to thank her, I guess.”

***

Montparnasse Cemetery is situated just a few blocks north of Rue Daguerre, the final gathering spot of the French intellectual elite. Charles Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are all buried here. Varda is now here, too, buried alongside Demy, as per her wishes. Their headstone now reads “Famille Demy-Varda.” It’s topped with a collection of sunflowers, another crop of significance to Varda: her 1964 drama Le Bonheur had a sunflower motif, and one of her final art projects was “The Greenhouse of Happiness,” in which she constructed a shack out of 35mm prints of the film and placed fake sunflowers within it.

The gravesite is absolutely choking on flowers, notes, and trinkets. Bouquets hail from the French elite film school La Fémis, cinema giant MK2, various museums, the Paris mayor’s office. Another from the modern tradespeople of Rue Daguerre – today’s daguerreotypes, inspired by her portraits of yesterday’s. The love is so massive it has overflown the cemetery. On a stretch of road just over the wall, the Varda grandchildren had painted every sidewalk post on the block – more than 100 – with her trademark red-and-white bob.

And along the headstone, a ring of potatoes. Varda’s harvest is over. Now it’s time to glean.

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.

“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.

Raffi Asdourian/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Pepe courtesy Matt Furie/mattfurie.com | Remix by Jason Reed

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.

* * *

“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.

* * *

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?