The Voluptuous Pathos of Karen Black

When Karen Black first saunters onto screen in Easy Rider (1969), playing a prostitute hired to give an evening's pleasure to the drug-dealing hippies played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, she brings with her an intelligent wariness that immediately enriches the movie's emotional texture. She's paired with Toni Basil, and the two actresses make a striking contrast, Basil clearly playing the more experienced, hipper of the pair. Where Basil immediately settles down next to Fonda with an air of weary bemusement, Black keeps her distance from her prospective john, her entire body held in a defensive, slightly adversarial posture. Even when she sits down with Hopper and makes inelegant small talk, she makes her character's anxiety palpable, moving her foot up and down in a neurotic gesture that signals she's trying and failing to get a bead on the spastic long-hair. Black's only in the movie for about ten minutes, in a scene that culminates with an acid freakout in a graveyard, but in those minutes, she's more revealing and vulnerable than either the taciturn Fonda or the buffoonish Hopper are for the whole movie– both men remain, by design, archetypes with no past and no future, while Black writes her character's entire biography with a nervous smile and big, wide, sad eyes that remain ever alert to the menace and generosity of strange men lurking in stranger places.

                               

Karen Black was the right actress for the wrong time, a distressingly real, jittery performer who expressed the pathos of being a woman with a larger-than-life personality in a series of movies that were mostly about the bleak romance of male angst and its inevitable causalities. The great 70s cinema of the movie brat generation represented, among other things, a masculinaztion of American movies - a decisive shift away from the Susan Hayward vehicles and Sirkian melodramas that had been the bread and butter of studio filmmaking during the classical era in favor of cinema largely about men's power and the often cataclysmic consequences of their desires. Great, charismatic, terrifically idiosyncratic actresses were too often reduced to taking the role of the dutiful wife, the girlfriend, the sexpot, etc. With her big, frizzy hair; big, bee-stung lips; and big, sad, slightly-crossed eyes, Black fit the broken bombshell mode all too well, and her career path epitomized the limitations the era placed upon actresses, but even if she remained largely marginalized, she never went unnoticed – she was too weird and seductively unsettling for that. Black had a way of creating space and meaning for the casualties of the new man's world of 1970s cinema, making audiences uncomfortably aware of the dangers of the masculine bombast and swagger that underscored the best American movies of the era.

She had the method actor's habit of theatricalizing anxiety and fantasy into a parade of tell-tale nervous tics, extemporaneous gestures that made the audience hyper-aware of her body and the fears it concealed. She also had the gift of making such inherently expressionist effects read as bracingly natural, the signs of a mind that had known travesty and grace first-hand and far beyond anything stated in the words of the script or the images on screen. This talent made her an unstable screen presence, someone who could bring a measure of balance to excessively macho movies or correct points of view that would have otherwise been chauvinistically one-sided, so that anyone who watches her instead of Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970) may find it hard to imagine how the movie could ever be misread, as it commonly is (thanks largely to the oft-excerpted-out-of-context diner scene), as a celebration of Nicholson's punk rebel persona. The first time we see her in the movie, perched on a sink, dressed in a short-skirted pink waitress outfit and putting on too much eye-liner, she's already playing the sexpot as a self-conscious way of attaining leverage over a man she regards with a mixture of awe and terror. Those big, accented eyes register every offense and wounding remark, letting the audience see that whatever her character lacks in the way of her paramour's education, she more that makes up for in her appreciation of concealed intentions and feelings. She's simultaneously a reminder that Nicholson's character is a lout and the main reason we stick with him and root for him until the end – we sense some latent integrity in him largely because Black plays everything in reaction to Nicholson's bravado, and her sensitivity to his rhythms and postures humanizes his performance, creating a sympathetic context for a turn that otherwise tends toward isolated (though impressive) grandstanding.

In a blissfully efficient genre effort like The Outfit (1973), Black created an impression of an ongoing human catastrophe that renders the cartoon violence that permeates the picture into something lethal, giving weight and darkness to a movie that might have otherwise floated away into gun-toting whimsy. Not that she couldn't have fun with her roles, as proven by her turn in Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976), where she takes to the femme fatale role with a disarming camp enthusiasm. And she's one of the many performers in Altman's “Nashville” who brings a feeling of palpable desperation to her performance, taking seriously the values of a musical culture that the movie risks treating as mere shtick.

Her last appearance in a film that evoked the real weird American splendor of the best movies of New American Cinema came in Robert Altman's blatantly theatrical Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) (in an exclusively female-centered film from one of the few superstar 70s directors to demonstrate a sustained interest in the inner-lives of women), in which she played a transgender woman who returns, after a 20 year absence, to the small Texas town that once ostracized her. Black attacked the role with a mixture of anxiety and delighted self-possession, giving integrity and feeling to conceits that otherwise threaten to come across as too facile and contrived. It's a satisfying and surprising coda to a decade mostly spent embodying feminine angst at its most dazzled and desperate.

Her big spotlight moment, however, came not in the movies, but in a detour to television, in Dan Curtis's crudely effective horror anthology shocker, Trilogy of Terror (1975), a ham-fistedly directed collection of Richard Matheson adaptations, featuring Karen Black in four different roles, that makes an impression thanks both to the elemental strength of the source material and to Black's myriad evocations of gleefully malevolent and neurotic femininity. In the most famous segment, Black battles for her life against a Zuni Fetish Doll, and while neither Curtis nor the special-effects team give her any help in making that threat appear credible on screen, as she screeches and screams across an attractively decorated high-rise apartment, she brings a miraculous integrity to the role – you believe that she believes that a stiffly mobile six-inch doll is out to fuck her up. Though the results never rise far above camp, it's at least supremely memorable (and hilarious) camp, and for all the frankly ridiculous scenes that precede it, the finale retains the power to genuinely unnerve thanks to a final image that was purportedly conceived by Black herself, and which she executed with an enthusiastic, sadistic menace that suggested a kind of disturbingly joyous liberation for an actress stuck for too long playing the victim of masculine pathologies. 

Black's final decades found her mostly starring in straight-to-video genre vehicles like Children of the Night (1991) and Auntie Lee's Meat Pies (1992), content to assume the role of cult movie royalty in films that lacked the complexity of her best work but which nevertheless offered periodic glimpses of the demonic grandeur attained in Trilogy of Terror. American cinema needed more of her eccentric intelligence, but in her all-too-brief heyday, she made the marvel of New Hollywood Cinema a messier, stranger, and more heartbreaking experience.

Originally published in 2013 at the now defunct cinespect.com.

RIP Wes Craven

Wes Craven's distinctive talent as a horror director - and it was ironically mistaken as a weakness by many - was his ability to make supernatural and human horrors feel like part of the fabric of everyday banality. There's a quality to the deeply unpleasant LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) where you feel like you're channel flipping back and forth between an episode of ALL IN THE FAMILY and Manson Family home movies, and as a movie born out of the experience of seeing the Vietnam War as prime time event programming, that apparent tonal disjunction is absolutely part of what makes the movie so effectively disturbing. Similarly, the sitcom banter and televisual quality of some of the early scenes in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) make the eruptions of grim, eerily impossible imagery - like Freddy Krueger sauntering down a dark alleyway with his arms stretched out eight-feet in either direction like a demonic Reed Richards, or Johnny Depp rendered into a geyser of blood gushing up from his bed sheets- all the more unsettling.

Craven had a way with actors that created a believable vibe of easygoing familiarity and warmth between his characters, a virtue more important to the success of something like SCREAM (1996) than its much-vaunted meta-horror content, and which helped NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET stand out from the stalk-n-slash crowd precisely because it was one of the few slasher movies that conveyed a genuine sense of fragile community amongst its teenage-going-on-21 denizens. Even a rather wonky mercenary effort like SHOCKER (1989) kinda works because it quietly sells Peter Berg and Michael Murphy as a somewhat estranged father and son so effectively. Most of his good movies - which also include THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991), and THE NEW NIGHTMARE (1994) - are about families and communities under siege, and they work because the human relationships in them feel well-worn and authentic, and never fall victim to the kind of insistent underlining that sacrifices characterization at the altar of theme.

After his brief grindhouse period, Craven developed a' relaxed, almost avuncular signature style that long-ago endeared SWAMP THING (1982) to me. It's a superhero comic book adaptation with a sense of low-stakes whimsy and genuine playfulness distantly removed from the urgent gargantuanism of most modern superhero movies. So here's a clip of Siskel & Ebert - not always the most reliable guides to B-movie bliss but right on the money in this instance - celebrating that film's considerable charms.

Howard Hawks in Chinatown: John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

[Originally published, in modified form, at the now-defunct Cinespect.com.]

John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China should have been a hit. Released in early July of 1986, all it had to do was dethrone The Karate Kid Part II,the biggest movie in America at the end of June. How hard could that have been, especially for a movie as grand as Carpenter's loony action-comedy? It’s practically the platonic ideal of a summer action movie. Breathlessly paced, casually weird, intelligently stoopid, and very funny, the movie does everything right. In outline, it sounds like a brilliantly calculated amalgam of just about every hit movie of the 1980s—the ersatz-Orientalist fantasy of Raider of the Lost Ark (1981), the supernatural smart-ass comedy of Ghostbusters (1984), the gun-toting working man bravado of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), plus the martial arts of The Karate Kid (1984). But it ran into three pieces of extraordinarily bad luck. First, it was one of two movies 20thCentury Fox had to distribute and market in July of 1986. The other was James Cameron’s Aliens. Guess where the studio’s marketing muscle went. Secondly, Carpenter’s movie came out during a crowded week, squaring off against Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective, Anthony Perkins’s Psycho III, Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon, and Edward Zwick’s About Last Night…Thirdly, it turns out that Americans in 1986 couldn’t get enough of Ralph Macchio kicking people in the face, because none of those films displaced The Karate Kid II from the top of the charts (that wouldn’t happen until two weeks later when James Cameron’s juggernaut rolled into theaters).

As a result, Big Trouble in Little China became something of a film maudit, disappearing from theaters before it could find the audience that fell for it on home video and cable. Carpenter, whose career seemed to be on the ascent following the popular and critical success of 1984’s Starman, soon returned to the ranks of the minors, making the low-scale wonders Prince of Darkness (1987) and They Live (1988) over the following two years. But for such a gloriously scruffy movie as Big Trouble in Little China, its underdog status, while disappointing, seems apt, and very much part of its charm. The movie feels like a private pleasure shared between those chosen few blessed to be in the know, the antithesis of the normal summer blockbuster experience in which every hit becomes an oppressive inevitability, turning the promise of distraction into a threat. In its failure as a blockbuster, Big Trouble in Little China experienced the just afterlife for good movies done wrong—it got resurrected as a cult movie, something for alienated creeps, pale misfits, and sneering losers like me and probably you to stumble over on TV or in the fabled video store aisles of ancient and near-forgotten lore.

The film’s failure to take over the world isn’t surprising when you really pay attention to the damnable thing. It’s a movie that perversely sabotaged its own pretensions to summer movie dominance from the inside out. As Carpenter himself has noted, it’s an action movie in which the action hero star, Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), is in fact the put-upon sidekick, always a beat or three behind the action. Nineteen-eighty-six was the year of Top Gun, and as that movie ably indicates, popular ’80s cinema was all about watching winsome winners winning (or seeing a possibly psychopathic, sexually confused dwarf start WWIII, which apparently amounted to the same thing at that moment in history), while Big Trouble in Little China is all about watching Jack Burton constantly make an ass of himself while trying to save the world. He’s a bit of a slob and a loveable fuck-up who’s nevertheless allowed more than a few stray moments of heroism in what feel like some of the most gracious moments in all of John Carpenter’s often misanthropic cinema.

The film follows Burton, a truck driver, as he ventures into San Francisco and finds himself embroiled in an effort to help his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) rescue his kidnapped girlfriend from the clutches of Lo Pan (James Wong), an evil sorcerer who must marry and then murder a green-eyed girl in order to achieve immortality. Along the way Jack loses his precious truck and gains an almost-girlfriend in the form of fast-talking lawyer Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall). With the help of virtuous sorcerer Egg Shen (Beat artist turned marvelous character actor Victor Wong), Burton and company storm Lo Pan’s lair, where they attempt to save Wang Chi’s girlfriend and destroy the villain and his minions.

Throughout the movie, Jack Burton consistently appears to be in way over his head, while Wang Chi proves far more physically capable (he’s an expert martial artist) and much faster on the uptake than his friend. The film thus reverses and parodies the conventions of Hollywood genre fare old and new (think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [1984] and the oh-so-beloved Short Round) in which the non-white sidekick basically functions as the comic relief while perpetually playing catch-up to the more-or-less super-competent white hero. In the film’s first action set-piece, Jack Burton accompanies Wang Chi to the airport to greet Wang’s fiancée, only to square off against a gang of bandits who kidnap her. Throughout the sequence, both Burton and the audience remain in the dark about what exactly is going on, and Burton soon finds himself outmatched by the assembled thugs. We then get a great drawn-out fight scene inside an airport terminal where security seems non-existent and the attendant crowd remains curiously unfazed by the battle going on in their midst—a stone-faced refusal to panic in the face of delirium that’s indicative of the whole film’s hysterical poise. A few minutes later, Burton chases the getaway car down into a simultaneously cramped and spacious back alley (John J. Lloyd’s often ingenious production design is one of the film's secret weapons) where he finds himself in the middle of a huge gang war, wherein some of the combatants appear to possess supernatural abilities. Throughout all of this, we get maybe two sentences of exposition, and we remain as clueless and confused as Jack.

The white lead thus plays the role of a cultural outsider who constantly needs the situation explained to him, and even then remains partially in the dark (the movie was co-written by W. D. Richter, who also wrote the 1984 sci-fi cult curiosity The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and Big Trouble in Little China shares that movie’s impish refusal to fully let the audience in on the convoluted backstory swirling around the characters). Consequently, we get a movie which treats the perspectives and abilities of its Chinatown denizens as the norm and as the accepted standard of competence while our well-meaning white hero spends most of the movie barely getting by. (All of which may help explain why the movie bombed in the year that Tom Cruise took over America and Ralph Macchio was seen as a god of martial arts.) But Jack Burton’s outsider status isn’t just a one-note joke; it’s also one way the movie approaches multiculturalism as a sort of Hawksian ideal. To even use the term multiculturalism feels slightly inappropriate here, since nothing about Big Trouble in Little China betrays the kind of white liberal self-congratulation that multicultural high-mindedness often entails. Instead, Carpenter approaches the cultural diversity of his heroic group as a professional ideal, a way of getting a job done with as little fuss and as much grace as possible, all as a way of updating the ethos epitomized by the films of classical Hollywood director Howard Hawks, whose movies provided a model for several of Carpenter’s own (Assault on Precinct 13 [1976] and Prince of Darkness were both modeled on Hawks’s Rio Bravo [1959], and The Thing [1982] was a remake/revision of Hawks’s The Thing from Another World [1951]).

In movies like Rio Bravo, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and Air Force (1944), Hawks depicted the travails of groups of men who fought and eventually triumphed against hostile circumstances due to their shared commitment to an almost mystical notion of professionalism. In movies like Dark Star (1974), The Thing, and Prince of Darkness, Carpenter explored similar dynamics but with his groups almost invariably failing to discover any kind of shared professional ethos that might save their asses. Big Trouble in Little China is thus an unusual Carpenter movie thanks to its optimism. Rather than another portrait of tightly wound men scowling at each other while getting killed (The Thing), Carpenter shows a multiracial duo taking shared pleasure in each other’s talents (or at least each other’s good intentions) while successfully saving the day.

The movie’s finest Hawksian moment comes shortly before the film’s climactic battle in the villain’s underground lair, when Egg Shen directs the team of heroes to imbibe a mysterious potion designed to give them a mystical edge against their opponents (or as Egg Shen says, "you can see things no one else can see, do things no one else can do"). The group consists of a bunch of Chinese-American toughs plus the seemingly anomalous Burton, all swagger and flimsy tank top and John Wayne twang. Up until this moment, Burton has mostly been reacting incredulously to the absurdities erupting around him, but for all his flagrant inadequacy, Jack earns his place within the gang thanks to his devotion to his friend Wang Chi. Their relationship, rather than those between Burton and his putative love interest Gracie Law or between Wang Chi and his fiancée (who for all the dialogue she speaks, might as well be a mannequin), is the film’s most compelling. Russell and Dun consistently convey an easy rapport that gives their characters’ shared history dramatic weight. 

Their friendship achieves its apotheosis during the toasting scene before the big showdown, when the two men raise magical cocktails to each other across a shot-reverse-shot sequence that cuts between the two men’s glances and their complementarily cock-eyed ways of looking at a strange world gone suddenly stranger. In close-up, Wang Chi opens with an American military toast, “Here’s to the army and navy/And the battles they have won/Here’s to America’s colors/The colors that never run,” to which Burton soulfully replies, as only a slightly wayward student of patriotic American gentility can, “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.” The moment plays both hip and square, all bullshit and no kidding, and the gesture’s smirking sincerity effectively brings Burton fully into the group dynamic and underscores the all-American grandeur of the team effort. Shortly thereafter, Carpenter follows up with an empyrean medium shot that crowds the ensemble into the frame as they descend down an elevator for the last stand, all the men clearly stoned out of their gourds and happily exchanging reassuringly stupid grins and goofy affirmations (Burton: "I feel kinda invincible." Wang Chi: "Me too. I’ve got a very positive feeling about this.") In its blissed-out, post-hippie kind of way, it might be the most utopian scene in all of ’80s American cinema.

The focus on the group dynamic further diminishes Burton’s heroic stature, since unlike so much popular American cinema, the movie isn’t especially interested in congratulating the hero for being heroic, and in place of the usual Hollywood movie coda where everybody gathers round and congratulates the hero on his good fortune on being so fabulous (as in Star Wars or Return of the King or, come to think of it, The Karate Kid Part II), the movie fades out on a fairly low-key celebration in a Chinese restaurant, in which Burton is merely part of the gang. Carpenter’s unwillingness to hand out gold stars to his lead gives the movie a soft landing that’s one of the film’s glories and one of the things that sets it apart from the self-aggrandizing bombast of its mid-’80s peers. In the process, he manages to put across a casually affecting vision of melting pot camaraderie.

Carpenter’s cross-cultural joke comes off so grandly partly due to Kurt Russell’s decision to spend the entire film doing the world’s best-worst John Wayne impersonation. Jack Burton doesn’t have much in the way of backstory, and in place of a biography that would inevitably water down the joke, we get iconography that comes to us through Russell’s John Wayne mannerisms. Having pretended to be Clint Eastwood for Carpemter’s Escape from New York (1981), here Russell channels the Duke as a way to create a lived-in sense of character without making too much of a fuss, exploiting the gap between the myth John Wayne invokes and the reality this affable truck driver conveys for all its worth.

We hear Jack Burton before we see him, so Russell’s “Howdy, Pilgrim” inflections become our first impression of the character. During the credits sequence, the movie cuts to a long shot of Burton’s truck rushing down the highway during a stormy afternoon, and just as the title comes up, we hear Burton say, “This is Jack Burton in the Pork Chop Express and I’m talkin’ to whoever’s listening out there,” with a slight twang that will be vaguely familiar to anyone who’s recently experienced another dark night of the soul at 4AM in the company of The Searchers (1956) or Red River (1948) or, heaven help you, McLintock!(1963). Russell’s John Wayne act ends up working beyond mere parody, since it accomplishes the exact same kind of short hand granted by great star casting. Namely, we don’t need backstory or exposition or that great snarling bugaboo named motivation because that’s supplied by all the John Wayne movies you have and haven’t seen, invoking a phantom idea about John Wayne’s faintly ridiculous swagger and vividly ridiculous grin and not ridiculous-at-all macho pathos to give us this workaday trucker who thinks he’s a cowboy come to the rescue because maybe he secretly is.

A few further words in, as the movie cuts to a close-up of Jack yammering into his CB radio, we get just about as much backstory as the movie’s ever going to give us. Burton explains, "Like I told my last wife, I said ‘Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.’" That last line proves key, as Jack uses it as a refrain spoken at crucial moments throughout the film—like during his reunion with Wang Chi, when a fumbled knife trick sends a beer bottle flying straight into Jack’s hand, and again at the film’s finale, when another knife trick allows Jack a heroic moment. It’s Burton’s mantra, and if doesn’t quite possess the poetic weight of John Wayne’s "Never apologize, it’s a sign of weakness" in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), it at least has the grace granted plain facts plainly stated. Burton’s heroism convinces precisely as an expression of animal habit, a way of getting by and acting against sound judgment that defines the character without the movie getting bogged down by the kind of ready-made kitsch pop-psych that made audiences worry about Ralph Macchio’s low self-esteem in The Karate Kid Part II: Even Further Up Your Ass and think long and hard about those hot and heady locker room glances shared between Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer in Top Gun.

Russell plays Burton as a guy who’s always playing catch-up, constantly reacting to other actors and events, forcing him off into the sidelines while he tries to figure out how to turn off a gun’s safety or fetch a knife from his boot while his friends helpfully kick all the available ass. At one point, Burton, while sitting in a wheelchair, glides down a slope toward a pit of more or less certain death, and Russell hams things up admirably, screaming, going bug-eyed, and looking legitimately terrified. But at the last moment, as the wheelchair careens over an abyss, Burton manages to deftly lift himself from the chair and avoid catastrophe. Russell maneuvers himself from buffoonery and grace with a precision that speaks well of his reflexes as an actor and gives visceral substance to his character’s airy boast about his agility . Russell’s ability to suggest both clumsiness and composure carries over to the film as whole, which possesses a kind of unassuming shambling quality that mixes somewhat unsettlingly yet effectively with Carpenter’s typically intense sense of pacing.

The whole movie shows Carpenter mixing different registers in the same cinematic gestures, as it weaves between action movie pyrotechnics and wise guy sarcasm in a manner that keeps the audience a little off-balance and more than a little nervously giddy. In his deft mixture of spectacle and comedy, Carpenter proved he was a visionary by stealing from Hark Tsui several years before everybody else starting doing it. Hong Kong movies became fashionable in the United States in the early ’90s, but in 1986 Carpenter was already paying attention to movies like Tsui’s Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983) (a movie he specifically cites as an inspiration in his DVD audio commentary for Big Trouble in Little China) and Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980). The Hong Kong influence loosened up Carpenter’s style, allowing him to mix action, spectacle, and overt humor to create a shuffling yet elegant rhythm that was new to his work (Carpenter has made only one other film since—1988’s They Live—which betrays an even remotely similar sensibility).

Where Carpenter’s movies usually possess a tonal intensity that stays in one mode for the duration of the picture, Big Trouble in Little China has an emotional range that echoes Hark Tsui’s contemporaneous work, and which foreshadows the likes of John Woo’s Hard-Boiled (1992). You can spot traces of the Hong Kong exposure in the way that Carpenter moves from shock to laugh in the space of a few seconds, as when a guy gets eaten by an amusingly rubbery spider-monster in one shot and Jack Burton responds with hilarious bewilderment in the next, or during the big final battle when Burton squares off against the villain (in his most successful act of derring-do in the whole picture) with Gracie Law’s lipstick messily smeared across his lips.

In the amusingly overstuffed finale, Carpenter combines his usual Hawksian fluidity with a goofy stylistic flamboyance that was new to his work. He blends mid-air sword fighting, FX-fueled magic lightshows, and traditional martial arts fighting into a dizzying crazy-quilt whole, and the film crosscuts between different scales and modes of action—a fairly straightforward sword fighting duel between Wang Chi and his adversary plays off the near-slapstick hi-jinks of Burton and his various foes—with an economy and precision that make it perhaps the best action-oriented set piece in all of Carpenter’s films.

When seen alongside such contemporaneous Hong Kong productions as Hark Tsui's Peking Opera Blues (1986) and Siu-tung Ching’s A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), Big Trouble in Little China’s kinship to its Hong Kong contemporaries gives Carpenter’s stylistic choices a new coherence, and Carpenter’s multicultural mercenary flair resonates amusingly with the film’s East/West narrative collisions. It’s a giddy funhouse approach to would-be popular moviemaking that looks all the more impressive now that the Sturm und Drang follies of pictures such as The Dark Knight (2008) (to pick on a movie I don’t entirely dislike) have taught people that ambitious shouldn’t mean fun and the MCU has fostered the belief that having a good time at the movies should be an act of frantic, teeth-gnashing desperation.

In place of pretension and desperation, Big Trouble in Little China has an easy, almost intimate affability that makes it feel like an elaborate private joke shared between Carpenter, Russell, Richter, and maybe two or three other grinning fools—giving the movie an insular quality that’s either one of the film’s chief charms or limitations depending on one’s affinity for Carpenter’s cowboy-hippie-nerd sensibilities. The movie’s gang-of-friends atmosphere wasn’t an accident. The movie benefits from the work of Carpenter’s stock company, a family of regular names that pop up across his oeuvre and constitute a filmmaking clique as noble if less durable as that which accompanied John Ford from film to film. It's a kith that included Russell himself (making his fourth movie with Carpenter), but perhaps even more crucially Dean Cundey, the cinematographer whose mastery of Steadicam-engineered unease and clean wide-screen compositions pretty much defined what people think of as Carpenter’s signature visual style.

The ultimate punchline to the movie’s inside joke would have to be the Coupe de Villes, a new wave rock band Carpenter formed along with his regular assistant director Tommy Lee Wallace and Nick “the guy who played Michael Myers and looks alarmingly like Adam Sandler” Castle. The band first warrants a mention in Carpenter’s 1980 movie The Fog, in which the sexy-voiced easy listening DJ played by Adrienne Barbeau introduces an anodyne smooth jazz piece as being the handiwork of our group. By ’86, the Coup de Villes seem to have abandoned ersatz jazz in favor of overblown synth-pop—more distinctive if no more graceful. The band recorded the song’s reasonably catchy theme song, a logical extension of Carpenter’s usual duties as film scorer (here providing an interestingly nervy synth score that works in tension with some of the movie’s more lighthearted elements, and helps maintain the movie’s relentless drive even when it promises to fall apart into a great hangout movie). The group’s apotheosis came in the form of a music video which accompanied the theme song, a video that in its short duration sums up something profound and awful and joyous and embarrassing about the late-1980s.

The average summer blockbuster now constitutes a competition between hype and reality, a game which results in a pulverizing insistence that you must always have fun at all costs, or else a movie whose budget was several times the GDP of many poverty-stricken nations will have been made for naught (do you dare have that on your conscience?). Too many summer event movies treat the promise of enjoyment as a form of emotional blackmail, and it’s a style of blood sport Big Trouble in Little China fails to engage in, not due to any pretensions of innocence or claims to nobility, but thanks to an amiable inertia, a feeling that nobody involved in making the movie thought that having a good time had to be treated like a kind of fanaticism. Big Trouble in Little China is an entire movie that seems to be muttering to itself another of Jack Burton’s words-to-live-by: "What the hell..?"

The High Art of Selling Out

[A piece written in 2011 for a now-defunct website, I was responding to what I saw as an unreasonable standard of purity when judging indie filmmakers' crossover efforts, occasioned by the tut-tut response to David Gordon Green's Your Highness, a not-very-good comedy that I liked marginally more than most critics. I've made a few minor revisions, but have mostly left the piece alone. Due to some personal upheavals, I've had to mostly step away from writing professionally (both in academia and beyond) about movies in recent years, so I haven't caught up with Green's two recent indie endeavors, Prince Avalanche & Joe, that received the same mildly supportive critical shrug that greeted Snow Angels in 2007 a respectful critical indifference that reportedly drove him to making commercial stoner comedies with his friends in the first place. Soderbergh's quasi-retirement from theatrical filmmaking makes for an interesting footnote to this piece, suggesting just how personal such idiosyncratic mainstream endeavors as Ocean's Eleven and Magic Mike really were, though the fine  TV movie Behind the Candelabra and his striking TV series, The Knick, testify to his continued ability to express himself eccentrically within the system. Linklater, meanwhile, has achieved something of a critical apotheosis in the last two years, with the one-two whammy of Before Midnight and Boyhood elevating him to pantheon status in the eyes of many critics. I've yet to catch up with Boyhood, but I did see Before Midnight, and though it's a film of considerable virtue, with moments of piercing clarity, it's also hobbled by Linklater's penchant for gawky, sentimental earnestness, so from what I've seen (including the estimable Bernie), I continue to think that the crowd-pleasing School of Rock remains his most satisfying work of the last decade or so.]



“You want to stretch—or you want to buy a house. They're all legitimate. As long as you don't try to kid yourself.” - Sidney Lumet, 2008


“I'm like a good whore, I go where I'm kicked…” – Sam Peckinpah, 197l

Sidney Lumet’s passing earlier this year marked the demise of a kind of director who is almost a dinosaur, someone who was both a workaday visionary capable of making tough, gut-punch cinema expressive of an idiosyncratic vision, and a respectable tradesman whose least personal work still betrayed evidence of high craft skillfully applied. He evoked the studio ethos of old Hollywood, the legendary 2-for-1 deal that made studio filmmaking tenable during the classical era, wherein a director got to make one for himself for every two he made for the Louis B. Mayer or Daryl F. Zanuck or Jack Warner (actually it was more like 4-for-1, and was entirely contingent on the director’s talent for making money and collecting Oscars for his studio). Of course, the genius of the system as it used to exist, and as Lumet sometimes quixotically practiced it, was that you could not always easily sort out the difference between pure sordid product and highfalutin personal testament, such were the consequences of consistent talent consistently expressed in sub-literate material over a lifetime of paying off debts. 

Whatever the gulf that existed between A Stranger Among Us and The Pawnbroker, both were Lumet movies, and over the paltry scheme of a respectable career the paycheck jobs didn't cancel out the movies that made Lumet’s reputation. In the end, it didn't balance out, because The Hill and Dog Day Afternoon and Prince of the City defined Lumet, and Family Business and Power and Gloria might as well have never existed. Of course, as long as an artist remains alive, people habitually assume that the junk provides equal counterweight to the treasures, as if A Fable matters as much as Light in August, which is why talk about selling-out and authenticity continues to carry undue weight in cinephilic chatter, especially where indie cinema is concerned. But here’s the deal: if you’re Jim Jarmusch, authenticity, and staying true to some deeply personal vision of who you are and how your craft relates to that identity matters; if you’re Eric Schaeffer or Edward Burns or Joe Swanberg, who gives a shit? In other words, what really matters is if the movies are good or if they suck, and how true a director is to some standard of purity held by himself or his audience is a matter between the director, his priest or rabbi, and his personal accountant. It’s nobody else’s goddamn business.

But whenever an indie director makes the crossover move into big ticket filmmaking, Very Concerned Persons everywhere climb atop their bell towers (or log into their twitter accounts) and bellow out accusations of ‘selling-out’ for all other VCPs to hear. Film doesn't suffer from this kind of thing to nearly the same degree that popular music does (where the habit reached its reductio ad absurdum mid-aughts when Gwen Stefani’s solo success led some to lament how she had sold out the apparently oh-so-sacred cause of mediocre third-wave ska – a charge that, if true, would seem to merit a parade rather than disapprobation), but it nevertheless persists, and perpetuates a great deal of nonsense that muddies the waters when people talk and think about movies. Take the reception of David Gordon Green’s Your Highness, a film that had the look, feel, and tempo of a cash-in, which led film critics like Roger Ebert and J.R. Jones to regret the fact that the director had forfeited his sacred virtue and become a fallen auteur, never likely to attain the admirable purity that enabled him to make movies like All the Real Girls and George Washington.

Ebert peppered his review with much hand-wringing about what could ever bring Green to make a movie as insipid as Your Highness, while Jones made his point more esoterically with a comparison to the fate of classic Hollywood director Lewis Milestone, who went from directing All Quiet on the Western Front and Of Mice and Men to the rat pack comedy Ocean’s Eleven (why going from Steinbeck to Sinatra is so clearly a downfall is beyond me, but such are the mysterious mental maneuvers of Mr. Jones). The fact that nobody particularly liked Your Highness is not in itself particularly bothersome (it is not, after all, a particularly good film); that every critic felt compelled to wag a finger at Mr. Green is. Especially when that sentiment comes with the conviction that Green will not and maybe cannot ever direct a worthwhile film again. Much like the post-War American critics who lamented the fact that John Ford returned from WWII only to make a bunch of silly cavalry Westerns rather than more movies like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, critical consensus seems intent on establishing the rules for defining what a David Gordon Green movie should be, rules that have every chance of blinding people to what they are.

Additionally, the caterwauling of VCPs everywhere indicates a crippling idealism that ignores economic realities. Nowhere do any of these reviews countenance the larger commercial fact that the bottom dropped out of indie filmmaking at the end of the last decade. Oh yes, there was the return of that eternal myth that the film industry was immune to the consequences of the great recession, but the myth had no more validity now than it did in 1933 (when audience attendance fell by 40%). While studio tent-pole pictures did just fine, smaller indie movies essentially saw their audience disappear, and even successes, like the precious, eager-to-please 500 Days of Summer, earned a small fraction of the gross it would have received just two years earlier. (Compare the 2009 film’s $32 million payday to the $143 million that the tonally similar Juno managed in 2007). Simply put, Green found himself in world where the audience for David Gordon Green movies – literate, shot-on-gorgeous-35mm films flavored with a strong southern, working class sensibility – no longer existed. The corp of indie filmmaking now consists of variations of loose, inarticulate, shot-on-crummy-DV slice-of-life movies about the trials and tribulations of aging urban hipsters. In other words, movies which are even more remote from Green’s oneiric, romantic sensibilities than a lavish, borderline-incoherent sword & sorcery stoner comedy.

Admittedly, the shift to big studio filmmaking puts Green, a filmmaker presumably invested in maintaining some sense of authorial identity across his films, in an awkward position, and if Your Highness at least doesn't suffer from the high-minded anonymity of something like Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester or Milk, it also doesn't benefit from the high-gloss goofball charm of Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight or the offhand benevolence of Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock, major league moves that clearly enriched their respective directors’ filmographies. Both directors provide aspirational models for how to make the proverbial “sell-out” gesture without alienating most indie purists, and their careers indicate just how useless alt-rock derived and Festival circuit-fueled notions of authenticity really are to modern American cinema.

Soderbergh has always framed his move to mainstream filmmaking as a redemptive gesture, after the experience of directing the moody indie crime thriller The Underneath proved profoundly alienating, and the interesting but bizarre Schizopolis indicated a creative cul-de-sac. His bigger-budgeted films, starting with Out of Sight, found him making looser, funkier movies than those that made his indie rep. The relative dynamism and spontaneity of his star-driven Hollywood films helped maintain Soderbergh’s credibility as a filmmaker with an idiosyncratic style, and the ease and frequency with which he moved back to on-the-fly, low-budget filmmaking (Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience) maintained his indie bona fides. But ironically, it’s within the confines of studio filmmaking that Soderbergh has made the kind of movies that most clearly resonate with the themes and attitudes he established in the past, while in less commercial films, like Che and Bubble, his personal stamp is harder to identify.

Soderbergh has always been a behaviorist in mannerist’s clothing, and the principle benefit of moving into big-budget filmmaking was the opportunity it gave him to concentrate on star-driven cinema, and thus lead him to concentrate on the beautiful absurdities that occur when big egos are forced to navigate around each other. Like his debut film, Sex, Lies, & Videotape, the best of his big studio productions feature detailed portraits of neurotic, shallow egocentrics vying for control against one another, a dynamic that came to the fore in Out of Sight,and the three Ocean’s movies. The Ocean’s sequels are fairly clear-cut examples of house-buying pictures, there because of the money involved and because no one regretted making the first one, but the resulting products, even at their most shambolic, look for all the world like what Harlan Ellison has called honest hack work, guided by a genuine desire to entertain and without any obvious urge to condescend too egregiously to the audience.

A similar drive keeps Richard Linklater’s mainstream work honorable. Richard Linklater’s big break as a bankable filmmaker came with The School of Rock, and like Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven, the resulting film proved redolent of Linklater’s sensibility and tastes, particularly in its affection for characters at their most disreputable and its fondness for observing slightly strung-out personalities engaged in the thrilling business of keeping each other company. Even the remake of The Bad News Bears indicated both a consistent sensibility and a straight-up desire to entertain while cashing in, and proved consonant with the scope of Linklater’s viewpoint as expressed in his 90s films. Like Soderbergh, Linklater has moved back and forth between mainstream filmmaking and indie productions, but nothing he’s done since School of Rock has been quite as good or quite as evocative of the discrete joys of Slacker and Dazed and Confused. The indie work, from Fast Food Nation to A Scanner Darkly, betray efforts to compromise his sensibility with source material and audience expectations that prove far more limiting to his personal vision than his hypothetical desire for a fat paycheck.

Ultimately, for all its flaws, Your Highness remains an idiosyncratic film marked by its director’s influences and his stylistic signature. In its portrait of a world made in the image of a fractured fairy-tale, with fraternal rivalry and paternal affection at stake, the movie echoes 2004’s Undertow. The film’s more eccentric details, from a well-endowed and very horny Minotaur to a pedophile muppet, suggest a genuinely warped way of looking at the world. And as MSN.com critic Glenn Kenny pointed out in his review, there aren’t any other stoner comedies in 2011 that reference movies by Dario Argento and Walerian Borowcyck. Your Highness, while admittedly mediocre, is still very much a film by David Gordon Green. But Green’s bound to look compromised when compared to the filmmaker who most obviously influenced his first three films (and produced his third, Undertow), Terrence Malick. Malick provides a particularly extreme model of a career based on an uncompromising commitment to a deeply personal philosophy and aesthetic, and while I find each of his films extraordinary (and let’s not forget the Malick as the ultimate ideal-of-auteurist-chastity narrative is complicated by some of his screenwriting-for-hire work in the early 70s), I also kinda wish he had made more movies over the years, and don’t think there would have been any great degradation in the prospect of Malick making additional films like Badlands, still his best work and also film that adheres most closely to standard genre conventions and the commercial expectations that shape them.

Your Highness, along with Pineapple Express, indicates that Green has no interest in being the second coming of Terrence Malick, but rather intends to pursue a career that looks a lot more like Sidney Lumet’s, thus producing a crowded filmography filled with its share of paycheck gigs and misfires, but with every third-or-fourth-or-fifth film revealing the same off-kilter, swooning strangeness that marked his early films. That means he won’t ever acquire the same kind of semi-mystical status that Malick has maintained over the years, but it also means that David Gordon Green will likely make more movies in the next ten years than Terrence Malick managed in the past forty. And given the weight of all the available evidence, I suspect that will ultimately be a good thing.

Satyajit Ray's The Big City and Charulata.

[This piece was originally published at the now-defunct website Cinespect.com.]

Satyajit Ray’s The Big City (1963) and Charulata (1964), both newly released on DVD and Blu-ray by Criterion, make a compelling case for the legendary Bengali director as one of cinema’s great feminist storytellers. Both films star the remarkable Madhabi Mukherjee as women challenged and transformed by the social and sensual pleasures of a radically unstable world, and the films depict the emotional realities of these characters’ experiences with startling acuity. They also reflect the influence of Ray’s mentor, Jean Renoir (Ray began his career as an assistant to Renoir during the filming of the latter’s 1951 masterwork, The River), by avoiding stridency or problem picture posturing in favor of a radical ambiguity that treats all perspectives with equal sympathy. Consequently, they’re also among the most perceptive movies ever made about marriage, conveying the fragility of human affection in the face of bad luck and good intentions.

Both films tell fairly straightforward stories of sheltered Bengali housewives coming into contact with the outside world, with profound consequences for themselves and their husbands. The Big City, freely adapted from a pair of short stories by Nerendranath Mitra, follows Subrata (Anil Chatterjee) and Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee) Mazumdar, a lower middle-class couple suffering from financial hardships that eventually force Arati to seek employment, much to her husband’s discomfort and the overt disapproval of her conservative in-laws. She obtains a job as a door-to-door sales rep, eventually out-earning her husband, and as she experiences solidarity with her female co-workers, she discovers a new autonomy and strength of character even while her relationship with her increasingly suspicious husband becomes frayed.

Charulata, adapted from a 1901 novella by Rabindranath Tagore, covers thematically similar territory in a strictly domestic context. Set in 19th-century Kolkata, the film stars Mukherjee as the eponymous heroine, the bored wife of Bhupati (Shailen Mukherjee), a liberal newspaper publisher and political activist who mostly ignores his wife as she wiles away her days reading classics of Indian literature and catching glimpses of life outside her spacious, tastefully decorated home via an omnipresent pair of opera glasses. Bhupati’s cousin, Amal (Soumitrz Chatterjee), a layabout and would-be poet, disrupts Charu’s ennui when he arrives for an extended visit. He encourages her latent literary ambitions, and eventually, their intellectual and temperamental sympathies turn amorous, as Charu awakens to the possibilities of life beyond her husband’s walls.

The Big City and Charulata don’t easily reduce to the liberal message pictures their plots suggest. The women in both films change radically as they open up to the challenges of the outside world, but they risk becoming strangers to themselves and their husbands, leaving both women simultaneously exhilarated and terrified. Ray’s films straddle the line between respect for tradition and hunger for transformation, an intellectual position he plays out in his view of marriages in which husbands and their newly transformed wives must come to recognize each other for the first time (to borrow James Agee’s felicitous description of the final image in Chaplin’s City Lights, another film about transformation and recognition). In The Big City, the moment of serendipitous rediscovery that climaxes the film echoes the transformative, if tentative, ending to Rossillini’s Journey to Italy (1954) in its depiction of two intimate strangers rescuing each other from the void, and though much of the film flirts with an Ibsen-esque literalism that bogs down the last third of the picture, the last five minutes achieve an emotional sublimity that belies all flaws. For its part, Charulata ends with an allusion to the famous final freeze frame of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (a magnanimous bow to the masterpiece directed by the man reputed to have dismissed Ray’s 1955 debut, Pather Panchali, with the remark, “I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands”), and appropriates the desperately sad but open-ended tenor of that iconic moment to comment on its heroine’s marriage and feminine identity.

Both films’ climaxes testify to Ray’s debt to European cinema, and especially the legacy of Italian neorealism (Ray claimed the revelatory experience of seeing De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief directly inspired him to become a filmmaker). Ray appropriated neorealist conventions to cover the discrete, life-shattering dramas of domestic spaces, transplanting neorealism’s focus on the desperate lives of men out in the streets to the lives of women largely isolated from the crowd and its attendant dangers. Even The Big City keeps location shots to a minimum, focusing instead on how Arati responds to a variety of interior spaces, from her cramped apartment to her boss’s threadbare offices to the lavish homes of the well-to-do clients to whom she tries to sell sewing machines. It’s an intelligent extension of neorealism’s attention to the material pressures that shape desire and destiny, and Ray’s marriage of spartan naturalism, formal lyricism, and domestic melodrama, in Charulata in particular, presages facets of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), and in its relatively stripped-down aesthetics and forthrightly progressive politics, The Big City exemplifies why Ray’s films served as a model for third world cinema as it would emerge over the coming decades, especially the observant, casually feminist films of the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene.

Both discs come with usual wealth of extras, including new interviews with Madhabi Mukherjee in which she happily recalls reworking with the attentive Ray. The Big City Blu-ray includes the illuminating documentary Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, in which film scholar Suranjan Ganguly expounds on the feminist themes of both The Big City and Charulata (though I recommend waiting to watch it until after you’ve watched both films); Satyajit Ray, a 1974 documentary on the director that includes some fascinating footage of Ray directing scenes from The Big City; and most significantly, yet another Ray feature, The Coward (1965), a relatively minor though still impressive effort highlighted by another great performance from Mukherjee. The Charulata Blu-ray includes an archival radio interview with Ray as well as the informative documentary Adapting Tagore, which explicates the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore and explores the many literary references that pop up in the film’s dialogue. Both discs come with the requisite booklet that contains critical essays and interviews with Ray that help contextualize both films within Indian history and Ray’s oeuvre. It all amounts to the typical Criterion class act, and hopefully augurs a similarly sterling treatment of Ray’s Apu Trilogy in the near future.

Disease, Delusion, and Delight

[Originally published at the defunct Cinespect.com in early 2012 on the occasion of a retrospective of Cronenberg's work at the Museum of the Moving Image. I think I was a bit too harsh on Crash, but otherwise I mostly stand by my comments below. Incidentally, I finally saw A Dangerous Method, and found its peculiar mixture of mordancy and pity affecting, though many seemed put off by the clinical, baldly presentational way Cronenberg depicted hysteria and its political and therapeutic consequences - which is really another way of saying that a lot of people still don't much like Cronenberg.]

David Cronenberg’s 40-plus-year legacy is up for review over the next three weeks at the Museum of the Moving Image, offering the opportunity to explore the filmography of the most idiosyncratic of all the North American horror filmmakers who emerged during the 1970s, and the only one who didn’t doom himself to dissolution or infinite repetition over the intervening years. By this point in his career, typing Cronenberg as a horror filmmaker is reductive, since many of his most celebrated and interesting works don't fit within the genre. But for me, and I suspect most admirers, Cronenberg first warranted attention due to the way his movies stood out from the gore-drenched crowd on the horror video shelves on which his movies hid out in the 1980s, waiting to disorient anyone looking for more than the run-of-the-mill nauseating obscenity to enjoy on a tense Saturday night.

Of course, Cronenberg’s earliest experimental works were never part of that lot of Saturday night shockers. For years, the only way a concerned connoisseur could see such curios as “Stereo” (1969) and “Crimes of the Future” (1970) was through bootleg video catalogs catering to the tastes of deviant videophiles willing to tolerate eighth-generation prints of movies that time and tide forgot, all because the pulsating, grimy, phallic dream images of “Shivers (1975) or Rabid (1977) had touched something deep and moist in their rotten Lilliputian minds. And those early student film works, including his rambling short film, "From the Drain” (1967), are precisely the kinds of movies most likely to benefit from being seen in impossibly faded VHS prints, since the inevitable muddiness always permits hope that maybe there’s something one simply isn’t able to see on the flickering television monitor, since when seen in relatively pristine condition, the movies play all too much like the awkward student films that they are. “From the Drain” is a particular stand-out a a thesis project casualty, a one-joke film that rambles along for a few minutes while mincing actors sit together in a bathtub in what looks like the shabbiest apartment in all of Toronto, and mumble their way all the way to the other side of afinal shot whose twitching, bewitching menace is the only noticeable foreshadowing of the hang-ups to come.

Both “Stereo” and “Crimes of the Future” are more pointedly Cronenbergian, which isn’t to say that either is particularly good (although the latter has an eerie ennui that enchants for all of seven minutes of its seventy minute running time). Both were filmed silent and then had a voiceover tacked on in post-production, a z-movie gimmick that echoes the formal delights of such brought-back-from-the-bowels-of-hell travesties as Beast of Yucca Flats (Coleman Francis, 1961) and The Creeping Terror (Vic Savage, 1964), which create an all-exposition-all-the-time sensation that’s generally less than enthralling. All of the information comes to us through a somnolent voiceover as the film mainly shows people drifting through long, empty corridors and open fields in interminable long takes. But it remains vaguely interesting because of the sheer oddness of Cronenberg’s approach and the narrative ideas he throws around.

 Both “Crimes” and “Stereo” stand out thanks to the language Cronenberg employs, a way with names and descriptions that’s perhaps Cronenberg’s greatest gift as a storyteller. The protagonist of “Crimes of the Future,” for instance, Arthur Tripod, works at an experimental dermatological clinic called the House of Skint and he’s trying to discover the whereabouts of the clinic’s founder, Antoine Rouge. Even at the start of his career, Cronenberg had a knack for word combinations that possess an electric, seductive eeriness (a place named “The House of Skin” run by a man named Tripod offers its own invitation and its own warning). Cronenberg’s way with words is very evocative of the gee-whiz macho paranoia of sci-fi literature of the late’50s/early ’60s (Dick, Bester, Sturgeon, early Ellison), as well as the late ’60s/early ’70s psychedelic SF-by-way-of-S&M erotica of Samuel Delany and Philip Jose Farmer, and no one has ever done a better job o. translating the terminological neuroses of those eras to the screen than Cronenberg. Which is to say that while the soporific narration that dominates both “Stereo” and “Crime” is spacey, drugged-out, not-even-pseudo-science nonsense, it’s intermittently really fucking cool spacey, drugged-out, not-even-pseudo-science nonsense.

Despite intermittent interest, however, the early films are best approached as manifestos of intent, outlining a collection of obsessions and aesthetic strategies more dynamically explored in his subsequent output. For the next several years, Cronenberg worked mainly in Canadian television, churning out documentaries and TV shows that are today largely unavailable for viewing. But in 1975, he produced his first feature film, Shivers (a.k.a. They Came from Within), which remains one of his most distinctive, and which lives up to the barely discernible promise of his early projects. Following the spread of a phallic parasite that turns its hosts into sex-crazed zombies, Shivers makes brilliant use of minimalist settings to creating a feeling of dread and paranoia. Setting the film inside an antiseptic high-rise, Cronenberg takes obvious delight in desecrating the building’s modernist façade, as blood and other assorted bodily fluids flow freely while the parasite triumphs over hygiene and Puritan morality. Featuring cult movie sirens Barbara Steele and Lynn Lowry in major supporting roles, the movie also includes a brief cameo from Cronenberg himself as one of the high-rise’s resident nympho-zombies. 

The film caused a minor scandal upon release, as it was partially funded by the taxpayer-supported Canadian Film Development Corporation, and the ensuing controversy led to Cronenberg getting evicted from his apartment on the grounds that he had violated his lease’s morality clause, The film’s images of gleeful, sex-crazed bodies cavorting their way deliriously through abstract, modernist spaces recalls Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), another famous film scandal similarly imbued with a sex-crazed mock-deviant doomsday glee (and which was officially deemed obscene by the very perceptive New York criminal courts). 

Shivers's combination of bold sexuality and po-faced camp outrageousness underscores Cronenberg’s debt to the New York Underground of the 1960s, with faint echoes of Smith, Kenneth Anger, and the Kuchar Brothers reverberating across the Cronenberg oeuvre. The opening images of Cronenberg’s next feature, Rabid (1977), lifts the biker-punk imagery of Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” (1964) as we see two impossibly beautiful losers, decked out in leather and stylish disaffection, race their way into oblivion and mutation across the open roads of Canada. The film stars the very pretty Ivory-Snow-Soap-model-turned-porn-star Marilyn Chambers as the distaff member of the biker duo, who, following a road accident, undergoes reconstructive surgery at an experimental clinic (a franchise of the House of Skin, no doubt). A new kind of skin graft soon mutates into a phallic parasite (ah yes, that old saw again) that infects anyone human enough to fall for Ms. Chambers’s charms. Anyone affected turns into a rabid killer, and soon enough the streets of Ontario descend into zombie-plagued chaos. 

Released just a few years after martial law descended upon Quebec in the early ’70s, Rabid, with its budget-conscious images of military vehicles descending upon the deserted streets of Montreal, engenders a powerful feeling of paranoia and dread, but its allegorical charge isn’t half as powerful as the great absurdist images of bodies lying around in dumpsters waiting to be collected along with yesterday’s trash as hazmat-suited garbage men make their dutiful rounds on another bright shining morning of the day after the apocalypse. Its pitiless pulp exuberance over the disintegration of beautiful things feels bracingly if accidentally consonant with the blaring vitriol of punk rock’s designer nihilism, blaring from nobodyz in-particular’s turntables throughout 1977. Speaking of the musical fads of the late ’70s, keep an ear open and unbloodied during a brief scene in a gas station, where you’ll hear on the radio Ms. Chambers’s song “Benihana,” her unsuccessful attempt to catch-up with Andrea True in the disco-hit-by-porn-star sweepstakes. It’s lively pop ephemera almost lost to the solid gold dustbin of history. 

Cronenberg next project, Fast Company (1978), is usually regarded as an odd duck in his filmography, and typically written off as a dud. It's unusually warm for Cronenberg, but it carries over several of his recurring themes in its portrait of race car drivers who live and die through their romance with their automobiles. The film’s best scene occurs when our heroes remake and remodel a racing car inside and out, a sequence given a seductive, erotic charge that foreshadows and arguably betters the auto-eroticism of Crash (1996). But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. “Fast Company” is actually substantially better than its reputation suggests, especially if you have any affection at all for its collection of cult movie stalwarts (William Smith, Claudia Jennings, John Saxon) and for the "You must pay the rent!" Victorian-melodrama-by-way-of-the-drive-in  plot mechanics the movie adheres to both slavishly and quite affectionately. A warm, funny hang-out movie, it’s the only Cronenberg film one might be tempted to call Hawksian. 

The Brood (1979) found Cronenberg back in familiar territory, though with a deeply personal angle that gives the film a particularly nasty, mean-spirited undercurrent. Made while Cronenberg was undergoing a bitter divorce, the film follows a recent divorcee (Art Hindle) involved in a custody dispute with his ex-wife (Samantha Eggar), who is the prize patient of a radical psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) whose methods produce startling and dangerous results in the form of the psychic offspring who act out Eggar’s violent desires. The little monstrosities are intensely unnerving creations, faceless tykes who recall the psychotic dwarf from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), and embody an extremely visceral misogyny, as all women seem vaguely associated with the vicious anonymity of Eggar’s offspring. An unpleasant but sublimely creepy film, ii might be the masterpiece of Cronenberg’s early period, demonstrating a focus and formal mastery new to Cronenberg’s work. It’s also another Cronenberg movie that righteously got under some people’s skin, particularly Roger Ebert's, who concluded his original pan with the rhetorical question, “Are there really people who want to see reprehensible trash like this?” Which I think would have made a great tagline. 

Everybody remembers the exploding head scene in Scanners (1981), one of the great pop trash images of cinema history, one that has become unmoored from its original context and exists as an eternal punchline in any respectable hodgepodge of cinematic greatest hits. The film is essentially a nihilistic spin on Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human, as Michael Ironside plays the leader of a new breed of powerful psychics (called “Scanners”) bent on wreaking all manner of havoc. Stephen Lack plays the scanner recruited ts find him, and the movie plays out his search for Ironside within the bohemian back-channels of Canada, winding its way among assorted losers and burn-out cases across the hinterlands. The scanners in the film seem less like superheroes than like a gang of frazzled acid casualties and radical chic poseurs. Lack’s stone-faced portrayal of the hero comes under a lot of criticism in most commentaries on the movie, but the performance fits the movie’s allegorical purposes, and it’s also very much of a piece with the whole run of laconic-to-narcoleptic male lead turns in Cronenberg’s early films, a performance aesthetic that, whatever its flaws, clearly seems to have been carefully crafted by the director. The film benefits enormously from Howard Shore’s throbbing synth score, a pulverizing, menacing work that’s among the best music he’s ever composed for movies. 

 Cronenberg’s next film brought him to Hollywood to work with a major studio for the first time, and oddly enough he did so with a project that in some ways remains his most idiosyncratic and disorienting–Videodrome (1983). The film sums up most of Cronenberg’s obsessions and visual ideas, and might fairly be called the most Cronenbergian Cronenberg movie. James Woods, in an entertainingly smarmy performance (is there any other kind of James Woods performance?), plays Max Renn, a cable TV programmer looking for the most sensationally exploitive TV programming available. He happens upon a disturbing S&M/snuff porno program called “Videodrome” and decides to track down its origins so he can air it on his station. But as he attempts to track down the source of “Videodrome,” Renn uncovers a right-wing conspiracy and increasingly finds his grasp on reality slipping. The movie also features Debbie Harry as Nicki Brandt,  Rand’s temporary partner-in-hedonistic-deviance, and the whole movie hums with a slick and sleazy New Wave vibe that makes it appealingly evocative of its very analog times even as it can reasonably lay claim ts being one of the first cyberpunk masterpieces. By most accounts a somewhat fraught shoot, the movie feels slightly out-of-control and half-mad, considerable assets in this particular case. 

Seemingly in response to the tensions that afflicted him during the shooting of Videodrome, Cronenberg’s next movie was the rather comfy and slightly bland adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1983). The film chronicles the travails of Johnny Smith (Walken), a psychic who receives a vision of the end of the world and sets out to stop it from becoming a reality. The movie is decidedly minor, but pleasant, thanks to attractive camerawork from Mark Irwin, and an excellent performance by Walken, one of the last times his assortment of mannerisms added up to a poignant character portrait rather than just a catalog of amusing quirks. 

Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) seemed to suggest another relatively safe project, a remake of the semi-classic 1958 horror movie starring David Hedison and Vincent Price, but the resulting film is among Cronenberg’s finest, and among the half dozen best movies to emerge from Hollywood in the 1980s. Jeff Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a scientist trying to perfect a teleportation machine, whose endeavors lead to a mishap involving y housefly that soon finds Seth degenerating into a half-human, half-insect monstrosity. The film’s first third might be the best romantic comedy of the era, as Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis achieve an engaging, flirty interplay, demonstrating a kind of warmth and humor not really seen in any other Cronenberg film aside from Fast Company. The film proved both critically and financially successful, and in 1986, the portrait of Seth’s sad physical and mental decline seemed allegorical of everything from drug addition to the AIDS epidemic, readings the movie is ambiguous and complex enough to support. Goldblum gives a great, funny performance, never missing a comic beat even when his character’s body is falling apart, and it’s just about the last time that Geena Davis seemed like she might be a terrific actress. 

The success of The Fly allowed Cronenberg to explore projects that, while still distinctly resonant with his thematic preoccupations, weren't so easily consigned to the genre ghetto where good films go to get pissed on. Dead Ringers (1988) represented the full-fledged emergence of Cronenberg- Respected Auteur. The film follows a pair of twins, both gynecologists (and both played by Jeremy Irons), who mischievously swap identities on occasion so that they can manipulate and screw their female patients. Genevieve Bujold plays an emotionally and physically damaged woman who enters their lives and sets in motion a series of crises with ultimately catastrophic results. While one may at times miss the gore and griminess of his earlier shockers, Dead Ringers is nevertheless a great film, a disturbing and moving portrait of emotional and sexual dysfunction that features Irons, alternately funny and frightening, in one of his finest performances (only his performance in Jerzy Skolimowski’s mordant 1982 feature “Moonlighting” might be finer), while Bujold’s twitchy, erotically neurotic turn gives the film a nervy, off-center volatility. 

By the end of the ’80s, Cronenberg had confirmed his status as one of the most interesting directors in North America, and had become both critically respected and commercially dependable. The ’90s, in constrast, seem like an uncertain era for him, a period of experimentation and provocation, bookended by two striking films, one an exploration of the outer boundaries of his talent and the other a return to familiar territory. 

Naked Lunch (1991) came about after his efforts on the Philip K. Dick adaptation Total Recall came to naught (the film, of course, eventually got made by Paul Verhoeven as an entertainingly goofy Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle). The resulting film doesn't so much adapt the William S. Burroughs novel as paint a hallucinatory portrait of the various contexts, cultural and pharmaceutical, that produced it. Peter Weller’s portrayal of Burroughs appropriately recalls the spaced-out Cronenberg performances of yore, as his Bill the bug exterminator wanders from a New York shit-hole apartment to the netherworld of middle-eastern dens of inequity, having lucid conversations with his loquacious insectoid typewriter along the way. Where nearly every other Cronenberg film can be seen as an allegory for drug addiction, in Naked Lunch overt drug addiction becomes allegorical of the creative process, as Bill tries to write his way out of oblivion, losing track of time, reality, and friends as his various delusions alternately provide sustenance and diversion from the hard habit of living some kind of meaningful life away from the printed page. It’s a bold, often jarring work that makes interesting use of its source material, although Cronenberg’s formal predilections, always intriguingly rigid, border on being awkwardly stiff here, a foreshadowing of the problems plaguing his next film. 

M. Butterfly (1993) is the only unmitigated failure Cronenberg has made to date. The problems seem ts originate partially with the source material, a play by David Henry Hwang loosely based on the true story of a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) who engages in a decades-long affair with a Peking opera singer (John Lone), unaware that she is biologically male, which eventually leads to him becoming a spy. Conceived as a critique of western orientalism, which we can discern because roughly a third of the dialogue consists of characters virtually saying, “Look ma! I’m critiquing western orientalism!”, the material is often pedantic and shrill. Irons has a rather impossible role to play, and is ultimately defeated by the part, and Lone never convinces as an object of obsession, not so much because he doesn’t ever come across as believably feminine, but rather because he’s so stiff and awkward in the role that he’s immediately off-putting. Worse still, Cronenberg never finds a way into the material, even though he clearly seems to be playing with his usual tone and form. Only the startling, operatic finale shows any panache, and one suspects it’s why Cronenberg wanted to adapt the play in the first placer 

Unfortunately, some of the film’s formal awkwardness carried over to Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), a much more successful film that nevertheless doesn’t prove to be quite the dream marriage of director and material one might have hoped for. The film tells the story of a group of car accident fetishists, led by Elias Koteas, who stage car crashes in order to both get off  and achieve a kind of vital, refreshed connection to the world. The film’s chilly, clinical aesthetic reflects the disaffection of its characters, and at least superficially seems in line with Cronenberg’s typical filmmaking habits, but in films like Shivers and Dead Ringers, Cronenberg had at least fallen in love with the disease if not the victim. Here, everything remains at arm’s length, and Cronenberg never seems as interested in his subjects’ peccadilloes as one might expect. One measure of the film’s limitations is that the cars themselves are never as eroticized as much as they were in Fast Company, a movie which comes much closer to expressing J.G. Ballard’s beguiling erotic perversity (as does the average episode of Top Gear for that matter). Nevertheless, the film is generally compelling and strangely poignant, thanks partly to a superb ensemble cast led by James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger. 

Existenz (1999) found Cronenberg writing his first original script since Videodrome, and it remains one of Cronenberg’s most interesting films. It got lost in the shuffle among a wave of false reality movies that camp out at the end of the ’90s (e,g,, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, The Matrix), Cronenberg’s movie treated its virtual reality scenario as a moral problem rather than an epistemological one, as Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a designer/player of an organic video game software that dissolves meaningful distinctions between game play and reality. It’s a murky, grimy movie that contrasts noticeably with the very pristine, clean look that characterized Crash. It’s another film about the ways an obsessive subculture closes itself off from reality in search of a thrill, and perhaps because its scenario works so well as a metaphor for cinema itself, Cronenberg seems much more invested in the material. 

In the same year that he directed Existenz, Cronenberg presided over the Cannes Film Festival jury, a confirmation that he had achieved elder statesman status and that his reputation as a director worth taking seriously was secure. Subsequently, his films in the aughts saw him exploring new material, going further afield from narrow definitions of what constitutes a Cronenberg film while still turning out interesting, if not always entirely satisfactory, movies. Spider (2002), adapted from Patrick McGrath’s novel, follows an emotionally damaged man (Ralph Fiennes) recently released from a mental institution who slowly reconstructs the traumatic events that led to his mental collapse as a child. The many shots of Fiennes walking around looking quite dejected in the atmospheric London gloom echo Cronenberg’s early student work, and the film’s central mystery is in fact rather obvious from the start, but the film maintains a dark, claustrophobic mood that replicates the mental states of its protagonist, producing a profoundly unsettling picture that works not so much as an explanation of mental illness (the film fails whenever it attempts to explicate) but as a convincing evocation of it 

With A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg channeled the lurid True Crime pulp tales that his father wrote for a living, as Viggo Mortensen plays a small town family man who may or may not have once been y dangerous gangster. Although Cronenberg lays the Our Town ambiance on a bit too thick near the beginning, the film hangs together thanks to Mortensen’s canny performance and Cronenberg’s ability to suggest that things are about to go bug-fuck insane at any moment. The film as a whole is a bit of a tease, since it never gets as weird as one hopes it will, but it’s an agreeably tense, nervy production that shows Cronenberg dealing effectively with a kind of milieu and character relatively new to his work. 

Eastern Promises (2007) saw Cronenberg further exploring pulp crime material, but to lesser effect. Mortensen, appearing in his second Cronenberg film, is very effective as an enigmatic Russian gangster, but Naomi Watts’s character, a midwife trying to find the identity of a teenage girl who died in childbirth, never feels convincing, and the scenes focusing on her have a halting, awkward air that prevents the film from ever being more than intermittently effective. The film’s highlight, a naked steam-room brawl between Mortensen and some would-be assassins, demonstrates Cronenberg’s skill at presenting brutal violence in a straight-ahead, unflinching manner that’s genuinely bracing, but the narrative surrounding that set piece never has the same urgency. Not a disaster by any means, but a mildly disappointing effort.

 In addition to his features, Cronenberg produced two short films in the aughts that constitute his best efforts in the past decade. “Camera” (2000) has the bland look of a PSA, with a seemingly genial commentator reflecting on the nature of photography as a group of kids play with an old motion picture camera. But the short slowly builds a sense of dread by overlaying the increasingly morbid commentary with shots of kids fooling around with camera equipment, so by the end innocence comes to feel malevolent, and the little kids almost come of. as first cousins to the mutant homicidal children from The Brood. “At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema of the World” (2007) is even more disturbing. Starring Cronenberg himself in the titular role, the short assumes the form of a news broadcast excitedly reporting the eponymous event as news commentators perkily spout anti-Semitic and anti-cinephilic banalities. Partly because he cast himself in the film, the piece feels like Cronenberg’s most strongly personal film since “The Brood,” and like that film, it is profoundly bitter and frightened, a direct expression of rage over incessant, genocidal anti-Semitism, as well as the threatened obsolescence of film history in the face of digital progress. But the short also happens to be savagely funny, as its two chattering doofuses manage a perfect mockery of news anchor imbecility masquerading as wisdom.

Last year saw the release of A Dangerous Method, a film that I still haven’t had the chance to see, what with being stranded in the benighted, third-world hinterlands of North Florida. The film received a respectful but mixed response and, despite widespread praise of some of the performances, was shut-out at this year’s Oscar nominations, a heartening sign that for all the accolades he’s garnered over the years, Cronenberg remains slightly out-of-bounds for strictly respectable society, a creepy eccentric working the edges of normality and good taste. He’s the kind of filmmaker who still makes polite people of good taste and good sense nervous, as the gentle folks fidget and grumble and whisper, “Is he really serious about all this? Is he really good enough?” May their dis-ease be your pleasurer.