Earlier this month, America lost one of its funniest and most versatile character actors, Garrit Graham. He was one of those actors whom everyone recognized instantly, but no one ever knew his name. Rather, he was “that guy who played X in Z,” where X is one of your favorite characters in one of your favorite (Z) movies—often a cult movie like Phantom of the Paradise.
For me, that favorite role/movie was in one of Robert Zemeckis’s early films, 1980s Used Cars. I should really devote an entire post to that movie, surely one of the best B-comedy flix ever made, with humor on a level of Mel Brooks and the Marx Brothers. And Graham one was the elements that made it so damned funny. As Jeff, the nerdy-yet-hip sidekick to Kurt Russell’s fast-talking main character, he both abets and reigns in the antics. Jeff is a mensch, nearly crippled by his own neurosis, yet smart and kind of sexy, too. Best of all, he becomes a hero at the end of the film. (He also participated in one the riskiest practical stunts I’ve ever seen, in which he is almost run over by a hurtling muscle-car.)
Sadly, Graham never achieved the kind of fame he deserved, not the secondary kind of fame that some great character actors enjoy. With a little luck, he might have filled the same kind of niche in the 1980s as Steve Buscemi would in the 1990s. Instead, Graham worked steadily in small, one-off parts in film and on TV. (He appeared twice in the Star Trek universe, playing different aliens.)
He was also something of a renaissance man, having co-written one song for the Grateful Dead and penned teleplays for TV.
The world is a little less interesting without him in it.
This installment of my on-going Synchronicity for Bookworms series came about when I was re-reading one of the cherished novels of my childhood, Jack London’s White Fang. Many decades have passed since I last read the book, yet I have vivid memories of riding the school bus while engrossed in the story of the young Alaskan wolf who becomes the protagonist of London’s story. Note that I don’t call him the “hero” of the story; London’s literary school of Naturalism doesn’t really believe in heroes. But few have ever written so movingly about the physical and emotional plight of animals—including the most dangerous animals of all, human beings.
As I was reading the book this time, I was struck by this passage, in which London describes, from the point-of-view of the wolf-pup, what the inside of his cave is like. And how scary one bright “wall” of the cave is…
By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
For some reason, I focused on the phrase “a thousand thousand lives,” and I immediately wondered whether this were even roughly accurate. After all, a “thousand thousand” lives is a million lives. That seemed like a lot, even from an evolutionary standpoint.
So, I dialed up the Wikipedia page on wolves and found that the question really depends on what kind of “wolf” one is talking about. Gray wolves of the sort found in Alaska split off from the African wolf roughly one million years ago (mya) . If you include the African wolf or its predecessors, that takes you all the way back to 1.6 mya. Therefore, if you fudge a bit and replace the word “lives” in London’s passage with “generations,” you can properly say that little White Fang carries the genetic memory of one million ancestors inside him, at least.
Of course, wolves, like so many great mammalian lineages, first evolved in Africa. Specifically, they are descended from African jackals, having split off from the jackal line over two million years ago. Reading all this, I remembered something I learned in one of my anthropology classes in college—the so-called Out-of-Africa Theory in which modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have evolved in Africa and then migrated out to Europe and Asia. This new, improved, model of humanity soon displaced the human species in those lands such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so on.
I did another web search on the “Out-of-Africa” theory and got a million hits for…Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Instead of staying on-course, I immediately went down this new rabbit-hole, hitting the Wikipedia page for the movie. I went to see it in the theaters at the time, but I have almost no memory of it. It is, in fact, one of the most forgettable films of the 1980s, the sort of big-budget, star-heavy drivel that Hollywood has been churning out for almost a century. I do remember that many people in the audience were crying at the tear-jerker ending, and that I wanted to cry, too, out of sheer boredom.
Naturally, the film went on to win seven Oscars that year.
In fact, I am being unfair. It’s not a bad movie. The cinematography is lavish. And the acting is brilliant (even though Robert Redford doesn’t even attempt a British accent for his real-life character, Denys Finch Hatton, probably because Pollack told him not to). Streep, in contrast, shows off her usual, preternatural ability with foreign accents, playing Swedish noblewoman Karen Blixen, on whose fabulous memoir (it’s great; you should read it) the film is based.
But the real standout of the film, for me—in fact, the film’s only actor whose scenes I actually remember—was German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who was a minor movie star at the time. I became a fan of Brandauer when I saw the movie Mephisto, in which he plays a conflicted Berlin actor who finally achieves fame when his most famous character (the devil in Faust) goes viral with the ascendent Nazi party. Brandauer also played a Bond villain in Never Say Never Again (another bit of drivel, but better than Out of Africa), in which he steals every scene.
I always liked Brandauer because he exuded the air of a blazing intellect, yet one that was tightly controlled. (Rather like Jack Nicholson, in fact, only German.) He was also just really, really charming and magnetic.
Unfortunately, Brandauer’s film career tapered off quite a bit after Out of Africa. You can imagine my surprise when I went up to IMDB, looked him up, and found that one of his more successful films of the 1990s was a Disney production of Jack London’s White Fang.
Yes, I had come full circle on the Great Synchronicity Wheel, returning to where I had begun. Only now, I knew a lot more about wolves, Jack London, Out of Africa, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Like a lot of Southern boys with a literary bent, I absolutely love New York City. Ever since I went there in the early 1990s to visit a girlfriend (herself a native New Yorker), I have been entranced by the place, a feeling which only deepened after I got a remote job with a Manhattan consulting firm and got to make frequent trips there for business. (That’s the best way to see The City—when someone else is paying for it.)
Ever since then, it’s often occurred to me that NYC is still Hollywood’s most beloved city, too, with L.A. coming in a distant (and often more loathed than loved) second. This is probably due to the fact that NYC is still the cultural and artistic center of the nation, as well as the place where many young actors and directors get their start, still.
Of course, many great films show the dark side of New York. Too many to mention, in fact, but the list includes Rosemary’s Baby, Seven, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Bad Lieutenant, and on and on. However, I want to focus on films that show it in a favorable light. That is, movies where The City is almost a main character, and a great one at that.
Here is a list of my top ten favorites. Note that I am including all five boroughs in my criteria, although Manhattan is, as usual, the stand-out.
Moonstruck
Moonstruck is the greatest romantic comedy film ever made. And so, it makes perfect sense that it takes place in New York City, which is our most romantic city. That is, it has the most character, the most mystery, and the most beauty. Like a lot of the films on this list, it takes place in one of the boroughs—Brooklyn, in this case, with its great Italian-American culture. Never has that city-within-a-city, with its family-owned shops, brownstones, and restaurants, seemed so magical. Like “moonlight in a martini,” as one character says. (He’s speaking of a woman, but close enough.)
Throughout the film, the towers of Manhattan loom in the distance like a fairy-tale kingdom, to which the heroine, Loretta Castorini (Cher), finally ventures with her new unlikely “prince,” Ronny (Nicholas Cage in one of his definitive roles) when he takes her to the opera.
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s masterpiece from 1989 is not only one of the best movies ever made, it is also one of the very few to depict life in a predominantly black urban community (except crime thrillers full of drug dealers and prostitutes). Set in the legendary Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, it follows the lives of several people who live and work there, including Mookie (Spike Lee), a pizza-delivery man, his sister Jade (Joie Lee), and his boss, Sal (Danny Aiello). The story takes place on a single, hot summer day when tensions—racial, economic, familial, and sexual—all reach a boiling point. It’s a great film with a great soundtrack, to which artists as diverse as Public Enemy and Teddy Riley contributed. With its combination of propulsive music, kinetic cinematography, and excellent, all-in performances by the stars, Do the Right Thing captures the energy and spirit of working-class New York better than any other film. More importantly, it’s one of the first hit movies to focus on the African-American community of New York, which gets a lot more attention than the Italian-American or Irish-American or Any-Other-American community.
Basically, it’s just a great movie.
Manhattan
What list of great New York movies could be complete without at least one entry from The City’s most iconic director, Woody Allen? (Okay, he’s probably tied with Martin Scorsese; see below). Manhattan is Allen’s lyrical cinematic ode to the borough, shot in sumptuous black-and-white and featuring the music of George Gershwin (whose work, apparently, inspired the film). It tells the story of Isaac (Allen), a middle-aged TV comedy writer who is dating a beautiful, brilliant seventeen-year-old, Stacy (Mariel Hemingway). Their relationship might seem ridiculous (even he finds it so), but he’s happy. At least, he thinks he is, until his life is upended by a woman his own age, Mary (Diane Keaton). Mary is Isaac’s equal in intellect, spirit, and sheer neurotic energy, and he finds himself smitten with her. Unfortunately, she is currently the mistress of his best friend, Yale (Michael Murphy), who seems to take her affections for granted.
Like most of Allen’s early classics, Manhattan is an almost Dickensian satire of highly-paid, arty New Yorkers, with their hilarious pretensions and absurdly tortured relationships. Isaac laughs at them almost as much as he laughs at himself. But it’s clear that he (like Allen) loves them, too. Especially Mary. She essentially functions as a stand-in for Manhattan (the city) itself—complex, gorgeous, and endlessly changeable.
Arthur
Steven Gordon’s 1981 rom-com Arthur is not a great film, but it is a very, very good one. Not only did it make Dudley Moore a Hollywood movie star (he had already been famous in the U.K. for decades), it revitalized the careers of Shakespearean actor John Gielgud and music-legend Liza Minelli. More importantly, the film brilliantly evokes the magic of Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of rich, alcoholic, and extremely lovable playboy, Arthur Bach.
Arthur (Moore) is a brilliantly witty, talented, and rich man. He is also a congenial drunk. He spends his days enjoying bubble baths in a huge, gilded tub set in the center of his penthouse apartment, sipping martinis made for him by his long-suffering butler, Hobson (Gielgud). Then, he spends his nights wining-and-dining streetwalkers whom he picks up on 8th Avenue.
In the hands of a lesser actor, Arthur might well have come off as a pathetic—even repulsive—character. But Moore was able to infuse him with so much charm and humor that it’s impossible not to like him. Crucially, Moore also imbues him with his (Moore’s) own wounded and vulnerable qualities. While Arthur has been psychologically crippled by his domineering and sadistic father, Moore was a chronically shy person who grew up with a myriad of physical disabilities (including a clubfoot). And Arthur, like Moore himself, was enchanting in his apparent childishness combined with a rapier wit.
In short, Arthur is a glittering, New York City archetype: the charming drunk who makes good in the end. And the movie’s title song, “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” is also a classic.
After Hours
Martin Scorsese is known for a lot of things, but comedy isn’t one of them. Yet his 1985 film, After Hours is one of the funniest movies about NYC ever made. It follows the nightmarish adventure of a likeable, unassuming nebbish, Paul (Griffin Dunne), who works in a Manhattan office as a “word processor.” One day, he ventures to SoHo in pursuit of a beautiful young woman, Marcy (Roseanna Arquette), whom he has met at a café earlier. Things go pear-shaped when Paul loses all his money en route to Marcy’s apartment. When he finally gets there, he meets her equally beautiful—but also dangerous and possibly insane—roommate, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a sculptress who dabbles in S&M. Thus begins a Dantesque—and very funny—descent into the bowels of lower Manhattan, with its odd cast of avant garde artists, deranged cabbies, bar hoppers, burglars, and general freaks. Anyone who’s ever lost their wallet on the wrong side of NYC will instantly relate to this film, which celebrates The City’s weirdness as much as it mocks it.
Dinner Rush
What list of great NYC movies would be complete without at least one film about the restaurant scene? My favorite is a little indie production from 2000, Dinner Rush. Directed by Bob Giraldi, the plot focuses on a single night in the lives of the people who run a posh TriBeCa restaurant. The joint is owned by Louis (Danny Aiello), an avuncular bookie and former mafioso, whose son, Udo, is the brilliant but pretentious head chef. Udo refuses to cook the traditional Italian meals that Louis loves, so the sous-chef, Duncan (Kirk Acevedo), secretly prepares them for him. Duncan is a working-class kid with a bad gambling habit, and Louis obviously thinks of him as a kind of second, “better” son. Duncan and Udo seem to hate each other, but they help each other when the going gets rough.
Intrigues abound among the restaurant staff as well as the diverse array of patrons who show up, including an art gallery owner (and his starving artists), a food critic, two young hoods, a pretty office girl, and a charming, mysterious Wall Street broker whose significance isn’t revealed until the end of the movie. (I won’t spoil it; you’ll have to watch the movie.)
Working Girl
In many ways, Working Girl is the best movie on this list, with its tale of a hive-haired, Staten Island girl, Tess (Melanie Griffith), with the intelligence and audacity to take a shot at success in the cutthroat business world of New York.
Specifically, Tess dreams of becoming an executive in the big Manhattan M&A firm where she works as a secretary. That is, she dreams of becoming her boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver in one of her best roles), a tough-as-nails business operative. Katharine, whose blue-blood background is as upscale as Tess’s is trashy, seems nice at first, and even promises to mentor Tess on her way up the corporate ladder. But when Tess discovers that Katharine has secretly stolen one of Tess’s business ideas and fobbed it off as her own, she decides to beat Katherine and the whole, male-dominated business world at their own game.
I love this movie because not only is it one of the best romantic comedies ever made, it also asks many questions about the nature of the American dream: is it real? Is it corrupt? What does a girl have to do (really) to achieve it?
Fame
Alan Parker’s 1980 film Fame is an underrated film about the experiences of “gifted kids” who attend New York’s High School for the Performing Arts. As with any coming-of-age tale, the main characters—who each focus on dance, acting, or music—discover a lot about themselves as people, and also about what it takes to succeed in the arts. That is, how to achieve real fame.
The young actors are all first-rate, including Gene Anthony Ray, who had never acted before. A young Irene Cara is a stand-out. All-in-all, Fame is a great study of that most celebrated aspect of New York City: its music, theater, and dance culture. Basically, it’s about the bush-league for Broadway.
Men in Black
At one point in Barry Sonnenfeld’s classic summer movie, Men in Black, one of the main characters, veteran MIB agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) tells his young trainee that the MIB headquarters are “Just like Casablanca. Only no Nazis.” But this is not quite right. A much more apt description would be Ellis Island, where immigrants from all over the world (galaxy, in this case) come to gain entry to our civilization.
You don’t have to be an English lit major to glean that Men in Black is all about immigration and the diversity that immigration brings. The film opens with the MIB men disrupting an NIS raid of a truck near the Mexican border. (K mocks the way the NIS men treat the “dangerous aliens”—i.e., Mexican immigrants.) Later, the new MIB recruit, J (Will Smith), routinely mistakes weird-looking (but human) people on the streets of New York for extraterrestrials.
The point of the movie is that, well, we’re all people. (Except for those evil bugs, of course.) And diversity is a good thing—a miraculous thing—which is another reason NYC is the coolest city in the universe.
Ghostbusters
One of my favorite scenes in Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters is the one in which the demon-possessed accountant Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) wanders the streets of Central Park West. He encounters a horse-drawn carriage driver and warns the man (and his horse) about the imminent coming of Gozer, the God of Destruction. After Louis staggers off, the driver thinks for a moment and says to himself, “What an asshole.”
To me, this moment reveals the message of the entire movie—that New Yorkers are the toughest, most unflappable people on earth. They can handle anything, so long as they stick together.
While purportedly a horror-comedy, Ghostbusters is mainly one long celebration of that New York attitude, especially as demonstrated by Peter Venkman, the quick-thinking, bullshit-spewing, totally selfish guy who leads the Ghostbuster team. Venkman is one of the great anti-heroes of American cinema. He thinks he’s just looking out for himself—until the shit hits the fan and he has to step up to protect his friends and his city.
Another great example is the old rich guy in the lobby of the building where the heroes catch Slimer. When Venkman, clad in full nuclear-powered GB gear, tries to hold the elevator for the man, the old guy merely puffs on his cigar and deadpans, “I’ll wait.”
Having once been an art student (well, a creative-writing student; close enough), I know from experience that the quickest way to start an argument among a bunch of art majors is to ask them what the definition of “real” art is. Similarly, the best way to start an argument among a bunch of cinephiles is to ask them what “real” cinema is.
That is essentially what the great director Martin Scorsese did in 2019 when he suggested that Marvel superhero movies (in their zenith, at the time) were “not cinema”. He stated:
Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.
Scorsese thus not only managed to make himself sound like a bit of a snob—not to mention a grumpy old man—but to also start an internet flame-war that continues to this day.
Ultimately, though, the whole affair was a tempest-in-a-teapot. Of course the Marvel films are “real” cinema. That is, they are fabulously well-crafted motion pictures that, at their best, have an emotional and even a physical impact on their viewers. They also (again, at their best) make important philosophical and political points.
However, they are a different kind of cinema than what Scorsese works in. In other words, what we’re really talking about her is the difference between literary cinema and popular (that is, genre-based) cinema.
This is the same distinction one must make between literary fiction and genre fiction. The purest and simplest definition of genre fiction is that, for the most part, the reader knows what they’re gonna get. A mystery is going to have a murderer and a sleuth. A horror story is going to have a monster and hero/heroine fighting it. A rom-com is going to have two people who should get together romantically but just can’t, for some reason, until the very end. And a superhero movie is going to have, well, a superhero with some kind of superpowers who is fighting some equally superlative evil.
The devil, of course, is in the details. We consume genre cinema for the same reason we consume genre literature—because we want to see how they pull it off. “They” in the case of cinema, being the director and the writer and the actors. How do they change-up the old formula, make it interesting and somehow new?
That is how genres evolve and adapt to new time periods and new zeitgeists. Daniel Craig’s interpretation of James Bond was different from Sean Connery’s or Roger Moore’s—it was more brutal, more bloodthirsty, and yet somehow more vulnerable, too. Just like us, the American film-viewing public.
In the same way, Marvel superhero movies are different from superhero movies of the 1970s (think Superman) or the 1980s. The characters are more believable, as well as being more complex and even vulnerable. I am, again, thinking of the very best Marvel movies: the first Ironman starring Robert Downey Jr. and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This latter film, which came out in 2014 (yes, it’s been that long), is probably the best film of the entire series. And, yes, it is “real” cinema.
Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”
In fact, as very few people have realized, The Winter Soldier is almost a remake of a 1975 film that most film snobs would agree is “real” cinema: Three Days of the Condor.
The only obvious similarity is that both films feature Robert Redford. In Condor, Redford plays a brilliant but very bookish CIA analyst named Turner who works in a New York City branch office. One day, he comes back from lunch to find everyone in the office dead, murdered by professional assassins. Turner goes on the run. Unsure of who he can trust, he kidnaps an unsuspecting, beautiful woman (Faye Dunnaway) and hides in her apartment. From there, he gradually figures out that the assassins who killed his work-mates were sent by a rogue faction inside the CIA itself. Apparently, Turner’s branch had stumbled upon a secret plot by the faction to invade the Middle East and capture all the oil fields (how very far-fetched, right?). Turner eventually confronts the leader of the faction, as well the head assassin, a Zen-Master-like Frenchman named Joubert (played with brilliant, icy effectiveness by Max von Sydow).
On the surface, Condor might seem like a very different film from The Winter Soldier. But the closer you look, the more The Winter Soldier seems almost like a remix of the earlier film. That is, it has all the same elements. The good-guy-betrayed-by-his-government figure is Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) who, like Turner in Condor, discovers a vast conspiracy within U.S. intelligence (S.H.I.E.L.D, in this case, rather than the CIA). Like Turner, Rogers finds himself on the run with a beautiful woman (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow). He confronts the leader of the conspiracy (played by none other than Robert Redford himself). And of course he confronts the lead assassin, Barnes, who (like Joubert in Condor) turns out to be far more complicated than he appears.
Even some of the individual scenes in The Winter Soldier are eerily reminiscent of those in Condor. Take the now famous elevator sequence, which is not only the best in the film but one of the best in the entire MCU series. On his way out of the high-tech and vaguely fascistic H.Q. of S.H.I.E.L.D., Rogers steps into an elevator and rides down. As the elevator stops at successive floors, more and more men step on, each menacing but seemingly disinterested. The scene works so well because everyone can relate to it, to that sense of unease we all fell when forced into close proximity with strangers. We begin to wonder: what if some of these people were evil. They could hurt us—maybe even kill us—before we could react. And yet, despite this unease, we do nothing because we have no real evidence of evil intent. We’re playing a social role. And that’s just what Rogers—a good-natured man if ever there was one, willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt—does.
Robert Redford in “The Winter Soldier”
I love the moment when Rogers notices sweat streaming down the face of one of the men next to him. He knows—as we, the viewers, know—that this is really, really bad. But there is nothing he can do about it…yet. It’s still in the future. Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have done it any better. Nor, for that matter, could Sidney Pollack, who has an almost identical scene in Condor, in which the hapless Turner finds himself in an elevator with Joubert, the master assassin. Each man knows that the other man knows who he really is, but neither can take any action…yet.
Ever since I read Mark Crispin Miller’s landmark essay “Hollywood: The Ad” many years ago, I’ve been fascinated the way in which the tropes and elements of an early “classic” movie can end up rearranged and transformed in a later pop film. Miller gives the example of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977). If you look closely, many of the components of the former get transmogrified in the latter. The apes of 2001 become the loyal Wookie Chewbacca. The cold, robotic voice of HAL the computer becomes that of C3PO the droid. The white, sterile interiors of the spaceship Discovery become the stark, sterile halls of the Death Star. And so on and so forth.
Martin Scorsese
That’s just what has happened here, with Condor and The Winter Solider. They’re practically the same movie, but shaken up by time and changing purposes. That is, The Winter Soldier is every inch a pop film, with the full intention of stimulating the audience with all the action and explosions and kung-fu fights that we’ve come to expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. But, on some level, the kernel of Condor is still there. The Winter Soldier is also a story about evil, rapacious men seizing control of government, and also the creeping power of America’s military-industrial complex. It’s also about the dehumanization the soldiers like Rogers and Barnes undergo as pawns in the hands of callous leaders and ruthless institutions.
In short, despite all its roller-coaster-ride thrills and spectacle, The Winter Solider is a “real” movie.
Author’s Note: I was bemused by the recent outrage expressed by some very silly (and possibily racist) people regarding the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Noland’s The Odyssey. That is, outrage regarding the casting of a non-white woman in a surrealist fantasy film that is, itself, an adaptation of a surrealist fantasy story from 3,000 years ago. Yes, a movie with cyclopses and sorceresses and a wooden horse (built on a beach with no trees) big enough to hold 20 men but light enough to be rolled into a city!!!
I thought this would be a good time to repost an essay I wrote some time back about Nyong’o’ truly amazing dual performance in a truly amazing film, Us. Enjoy!
The better part of a decade has passed since Jordan Peele’s landmark horror film Get Out was released, marking Peele’s transformation from famed comedy writer and sketch artist to one of the most important filmmakers of our time. Peele has since added two more films to his horror oeuvre—2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope.
All three are great, but my favorite is Us. For me, it hits on the deepest and most disturbing level, and it has the richest palette in terms of effects. It’s also the hardest to figure out in terms of plot. With Nope and Get Out, the viewer has a vague sense of what’s going on, even early in the film (although the details turn out to be more shocking and terrifying than anyone suspected). But while watching Us, I was totally mystified. I knew it had something to do with evil twins—true doppelgängers in both the literal and the psychological sense—but I had no real idea of what the actual plot would turn out to reveal. And what a reveal it is!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Part of Us’s appeal lies in its slow-burn first act. (This is true of Get Out and Nope, too, but Us takes it to the next level.) The movie starts with a flashback to 1986, when a little girl, Adelaide, breaks away from her bickering parents at a beach boardwalk and finds a strange funhouse. It’s a simple premise, yet so much disturbing stuff is going on in this segment that it’s almost impossible to describe. We have the tension between the parents, raising the specter of divorce (the thing most kids fear more than anything else except death). Then, we have the separation of the child from the parents (another primal fear). And, finally, we have the freakish funhouse, which, though apparently deserted, is still lit with eerie neon light.
Well, the day has arrived. My debut novel, Twice the Trouble, is a Kindle Daily Deal for $1.99 today on Amazon. The offer will stand until 11:59 P.M. tonight, Pacific Standard Time, at which point it will turn into a pumpkin or…something. (Actually, it will just end.)
So, to finish my list of Great Movie Countdowns, I’m selecting what many people think is the greatest James Bond movie of all, 1964’s Goldfinger, directed by series veteran Guy Hamilton.
One of the most magical things about James Bond, the character, is that he knows how to do just about everything. He can fight and shoot, of course. But he can also fly a plane, drive a tank, sail a boat, race a motorcycle, surf, and even (as he shows in Goldfinger) play a mean-and-dirty round of golf.
One thing Bond does not know how to do, unfortunately, is disarm an atomic bomb. Which is a problem, because that’s exactly the threat he faces in the climax of Goldfinger. Bond finds himself locked inside the huge, cavernous vault of Fort Knox, surrounded by stacks of gold bars and handcuffed to said atomic bomb, with just a few minutes ticking down on the device’s timer. (This might be the first use of a digital timer in any major motion picture; let me know in the comments if you can think of an earlier one.)
As if this weren’t bad enough, Bond isn’t alone inside the vault. Goldfinger’s chief henchman, Odd Job, is in there too. If Goldfinger is the best Bond movie ever, then Odd Job is the scariest Bond henchman ever. Played by Japanese-American wrestler Harold Sakata, he has such a great, imposing physical presence—a hulking man who seems barely able to hold his own strength in check. When he crushes a golf ball with his bare hands, we, as viewers, really believe he could do it! But what really makes Odd Job scary is his evil little smile. He always seems bemused, enjoying himself, even when he throws a guy off a balcony or throws his steel-brimmed bowler hat into someone’s neck.
In the movie’s climactic countdown (yes, another countdown to nuclear self-destruction), Odd Job seems determined—even happy—to make sure the bomb goes off, despite the obvious fact that it will mean his own death, too. Odd Job, it seems, isn’t afraid of anything except failing in his mission, which makes him that much scarier.
My classics professor in college once said that James Bond is the modern version of Heracles, who, like Bond, loves to fight, drink, and sleep around. Sure enough, the final battle between Bond and Odd Job feels a lot like a Greek myth, with the hero battling a monster—one with some really scary weapons—to the death. And, as in a Greek myth, the contest ends with an example of poetic irony. Odd Job is undone by his own superpower—in this case, his favorite weapon, that lethal, steel-brimmed hat. Bond manages to get hold of it and throws it at him. It misses, alas, and lodges into some steel bars. Instead of just finishing Bond off, though, Odd Job goes to retrieve his beloved hat, at which point Bond slides across the floor and touches a loose power cable to the bars. Current conducts through the bars and through the steel hat, electrocuting the villain. Thus, the monster is defeated by his own magic.
But what about the bomb? Looking inside the device, Bond seems genuinely clueless, for once, bewildered by all the wires and blinky lights. Pathetically, he even tries to stop the machine’s spinning cylinder (which holds, we presume, the cobalt-iodine mixture that makes the bomb “particularly dirty,” in Goldfinger’s words). All to no avail.
Then, with mere seconds left, a man’s gentle hand sweeps in, stops Bond’s frantic groping, and turns the bomb off with the flick of a switch. With the crisis averted, Bond and the man—who looks like a wizened college professor, wearing a brown suit and hat, his face serious yet calm—face each other. A strange look passes between them. A mixture of relief, puzzlement, and awe, the look seems to suggest the entire absurd, insane reality of the Cold War, if not modern existence itself. “How did we get here?” the look seems to say.
The idea that horror films might in any way be construed as “pro-feminist” seems counterintuitive to most people. It certainly did to me. After all, women are the preferred victims of horror films, especially the slasher genre in which entire sororities and girls-only sleep-overs are massacred wholesale, often in grisly—and blatantly sexual—methods.
But, as I recently learned, pro-feminist readings of classic horror films are a genuine thing, having a genuine moment. And I was completely convinced of their validity by Eleanor Johnson’s excellent book, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism, 1968-1980. Early in the book, Johnson’s addresses the apparent absurdity of looking for feminist ideas in horror films, going so far as to quote Alfred Hitchcock’s famous formula for an effective thriller: “Torture the women.” Johnson does not minimize the misogyny of classic horror films. Indeed, she goes to great pains to explain that horror films—like any work of art—can often be self-contradictory, sexist on one visceral level but feminist on a deeper, almost subconscious one.
She writes:
[H]orror also has a deep and enduring relationship with American feminism. In fact, American feminism and American horror have been—for more than half a century—allies on issues of domestic abuse, reproductive control, and women’s restricted rights relative to men.
Horror films that focus on violence and persecution of women often do double-duty, serving as a means of getting otherwise conservative or traditionalist viewers to see the plight of women in the first place. More importantly, as Johnson’s title suggests, horror films subconsciously force the viewer to participate in the suffering of women, and thus empathize with their condition.
She writes,
What’s so important about the domestic horror films in this book is that they make viewers—whether or not the viewers are female—carry the fear and vulnerability embodied by the women in the films home with them. They center on a woman’s perspective, making audiences feel wracking physiological and psychological compassion for the women characters who are abused and terrorized. The films, although they showcase women’s suffering, do not simply fetishize that suffering, but rather humanize it, make it palpable, exportable to the viewers’ own minds and bodies. They invite viewers into the lived, embodied experiences of abused women; women barred from power, barred from speaking for themselves, barred from defending themselves; women who weren’t taken seriously by the people from whom they sought aid—doctors, police, lawyers, psychiatrists, husbands, coworkers. These movies took what was going on in American cultural, political, and legal history in the late 1960s and 1970s, and they made those things feelable. They made women’s suffering come alive to viewers who might not otherwise ever have stopped to think about what or how women suffered in the United States, behind closed doors, in the twentieth century. They made that suffering seem like an emergency. And then they made that suffering follow viewers all the way home and nest there.
Johnson goes on to explain her main thesis—namely, that horror films were instrumental in raising public awareness of women’s civil rights issues, and even in changing laws—by focusing on six classic horror films: Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, The Omen, Alien, and The Shining. She examines these films in chronological order, and so it is probably no accident that the oldest, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, is also the basis for her most compelling argument.
For those who haven’t seen it (i.e., anyone under 40), Rosemary’s Baby is the story of a young couple, Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, who move into an old, spooky apartment building in Manhattan. They befriend their elderly neighbors, the Castevets, who (it later turns out) run a coven of witches. With the secret cooperation of Guy, the witches drug Rosemary, conjure up Satan, and watch as he rapes the poor woman. Throughout the act, Rosemary is doped up but conscious, hallucinating that she is on a boat, rocking on a rough sea. At moments, though, she becomes lucid, and realizes that she is actually being raped by a huge, hairy creature. “This is no dream,” she yells, in the film’s most horrifying line. “This is really happening.”
The next morning, Guy tells her that he had sex with her while she was asleep. (The scratches on her body, he explains, are due to his “getting a little carried away”). Rosemary is unconvinced but, in true trad-wife fashion, doesn’t make a fuss. When she later becomes pregnant, the Castevets refer her to an old OB-GYN, Dr. Sapirstein, who puts her on a regimen of foul-tasting protein shakes and other noxious concoctions. As the pregnancy progresses, Rosemary finds herself in agonizing pain. Her women friends (whom Guy discourages her from seeing) beg her to find a new doctor, but, again, Rosemary doesn’t make a fuss.
Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby”
After she finally gives birth at home, the witches take the baby away. Guy tells her it died. But she can hear an infant crying from next door, and the neighbors insist on collecting Rosemary’s milk, which they convinced her to express into glass jars.
At some point, she finds a secret door into the Castevets apartments, only to find them, Dr. Sapirstein, and a bunch of other nattily-dressed devil-worshipers having a party. They are gathered around a cradle in which, of course, Rosemary’s baby lies. The baby himself is never shown. Rather, we only see her horrified reaction when she pulls back the veil and views the hell-spawn. “What’s wrong with his eyes?” she asks. “He has his father’s eyes,” Mr. Castevet replies.
I’ve probably seen Rosemary’s Baby half a dozen times, yet I never put it together that the film is almost a parable about the cruelty of anti-abortion laws. Not until I read Ms. Johnson’s book, that is. As she points out, Rosemary is probably cinema’s most extreme example of a woman forced to complete an unwanted (and very dangerous) pregnancy. One that is, in fact, the result of a rape (by the Devil, no less). As Johnson writes,
By New York State’s own abortion laws in 1968, Rosemary would not have been able to get an abortion on grounds of rape alone. Rape was not justification enough for abortion in 1968 in New York, nor was physical danger, nor psychological harm. Nor, indeed, was the prospect of having a baby born with deformities—which would seem likely when the child’s father is a claw-handed, leather-skinned, goat-eyed demon. The Satanic fetus, whose true range of deformities could only be known after the birth of the child, allegorizes the thousands of thalidomide pregnancies across the United States that women were forced to carry to term, anxiously waiting to see how compromised their babies would be by the drug the women had taken. Like them, Rosemary is going to be forced to carry to term a pregnancy of unknown viability. [Link added]
Of course, it isn’t just a lack of reproductive health rights that causes Rosemary’s ordeal. It’s her lack of freedom in general—financial, educational, and (above all) psychological—that traps her in a private hell. In some ways, her husband, Guy, comes off as even more evil than the Castavets in the way he gaslights and manipulates his wife. And it is this kind of domestic abuse—sometimes physical, always mental—on which Johnson primarily focuses for the rest of the book.
Lee Remick in “The Omen”
In The Omen, for instance, a wealthy man lies to his (much younger) wife, Kathy, when their baby dies at birth. At the urging of a local priest, he takes another baby whose mother has just died and passes him off to Kathy as her own. Naturally, the baby turns out to be the anti-Christ (once again), and the wife suffers mightily (once again), finally being killed by the little bastard and his evil minions. Unlike Guy Woodhouse, the husband in this story is not evil, nor self-serving. He genuinely thinks he’s being kind to his wife in doing the ole baby switch-a-roo, trying to spare her the heartbreak of losing a child. Of course, she has lost a child, and she deserves to know the truth. Moreover, she certainly does not deserve to be tricked into raising the spawn of hell. But her husband, in true patriarchal fashion, does what he sees fit. The result is the same.
I especially enjoyed Johnson’s examination of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which she presents as an apotheosis of the domestic-abuse horror genre. I have always felt that Shelley Duvall’s fine, selfless performance as the tormented wife, Wendy, was the most underappreciated (and even mocked) aspect of the film. Indeed, she is the center of the movie, without which it would have no meaning.
Also, of all the films’ hapless heroines, Wendy’s plight is the most isolating and claustrophobic. As Johnson writes,
Rosemary can’t easily get away from the coven, but she can go see her doctors and, on occasion, her friends. Chris [in The Exorcist] is in thrall to the demon every bit as much as Regan is, but she still manages to go out to see doctors and priests. Joanna has quite a bit of freedom of movement, until the end of Stepford Wives; same with Kathy from The Omen. Ellen Ripley [in Alien] is every bit as imprisoned as Wendy Torrance, but her imprisonment feels incidental because she’s trapped on a floating domestic space, and everyone else is trapped right along with her. Wendy’s entrapment feels obvious, manifest, total, unbreachable. She’s trapped by the hotel; by [her husband] Jack; by the weather; by the distance to any other person or place, to any kind of shelter. The horror of The Shining isn’t ultimately the ghosts in the hotel. It’s Jack and his total imprisonment of Wendy. And, as viewers, we are trapped with her.
Shelley Duvall in “The Shining”
Indeed.
Scream with Me is a hell of a book. Check it out…!
Author’s Note: Well, I finally watched Project Hail Mary a few days ago. The film is a mash-up of The Andromeda Strain, Planet of the Apes, E.T., Wall-E, and at least half-a-dozen other classic sci-fi movies. And that’s okay. Everything is a remix. And Project Hail Mary is a fine film—gorgeous, exciting, suspenseful, and (yes) heartwarming.
It’s also another great example the The Scientist Hero archetype that I suggested a while back (writing about another Andy Weir film, The Martian.) So, I thought I would repost. Enjoy…
One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.
How does he overcome all these challenges?
Science.
The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.
No self-respecting cinephile could live with themselves if they failed to mark the passing of a great movie star like Sam Neill. Yes, Neill was a movie star. He seldom played the lead in big-budget films—Jurassic Park was a lucky exception, and even that film was more of an ensemble piece—yet whenever he was on-screen, it was impossible to take your eyes off him. And that inexplicable quality, more than anything, is what defines a movie star.
I say inexplicable, because no one can really define it. Yes, it has something to do with good looks, and Neill was definitely handsome. (Early in his career, he was an outright heartthrob in his native New Zealand.) Intelligence, too, often has something to do with star-power, and Neill was certainly, obviously smart. And charming, albeit in a reserved, unassuming way.
But there are lots of other good-looking, smart, and charming actors who never achieve the status of movie star. Neill did. How did he do it? I’m not sure. If I had to assign Neill one of my 15 Hollywood archetypes, I guess he would fit best in the Noble Everyman slot. But he was almost too handsome for that category. Really, he was almost his own archetype—that of the quiet, capable, professional man.
These terms certainly describe the first role I saw him in, which made me a fan—that of the titular superspy in Reilly, Ace of Spies. A 12-part miniseries shown on the Masterpiece Theater program in America, it told the story of the dapper, aristocratic, and amoral Sidney Reilly, a Russian-born secret agent who works for the British Empire circa 1910. With his deceptively soft, incisive voice and penetrating intellect, Neill was perfect for the role, and it made him a star.
Throughout his subsequent film career, he played many other resourceful, smart, but quiet characters, often in supporting roles. He played naval officers (Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October), scientists (Jurassic Park, The Dish), and, of course, spies (Reilly, Ace of Spies, Plenty).
Whatever he played, though, he always exuded a kind of affable, open, benign quality that viewers instinctively warmed to.
I’ve written a lot about the liminal space aesthetic recently, and especially its importance in a brand of speculative fiction that I call Vortex. So, I was pleased to learn that it has a thriving following on Youtube. Specifically, The Backrooms channel.
I learned this from another Youtube channel that I really like, Monstrum. Here is the episode on The Backrooms. Check it out!
