Elevator Pitch

The eponymous Highlander is Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert), a sixteenth century Scottish clansman, who miraculously recovers from a mortal wound. The flamboyant Ramirez (Sean Connery) reveals to him that they are both members of a mysterious group of immortals who can only be killed by having their heads cut off. Now the immortals are gathering in ‘80s New York for a decapita-thon in which the last one with an intact noggin will win the nebulously defined ‘Prize’. All of which has attracted the attention of the NYPD, even as MacLeod must face the most fearsome of all the immortals, The Kurgan (Clancy Brown). Because, as the poster says: “There can be only one.”

It is somewhat ironic that Highlander uses decapitation as a plot element, because it is a film best enjoyed without a brain.

Quentin Tarantino has coined a meta genre he calls ‘the hang out movie’: one in which the core appeal is hanging out with the characters. In some movies — such as any film by Jim Jarmusch, or Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) — the depiction of ‘hanging out’ is pretty much the whole film. But a ‘hang out’ movie can fall in any genre; Tarantino was specifically talking about Howard Hawks’’s Western Rio Bravo (1959). Tarantino’s own Pulp Fiction (1994) is a ‘hang out’ movie.

Highlander is a subtly different kind of ‘hang out’ movie, though; it’s the kind of movie you put on while hanging out. It was made in the VHS era, when you could put films on in the background while you played with action figures and recited the catchphrase dialogue. It is perfect for projecting on a blank wall in a hipster dive bar at 2 in the morning, so that the drunks can get hysterical about the OTT sequence that follows the first decapitation: cars in a parking lot rhythmically bumping up and down, a hose unfurling in a tumescent burst of froth, and Christopher Lambert moaning orgasmically. (This is referred to as ‘The Quickening’, a medieval term for the first sense a woman has of pregnancy, which should give you some idea of the adolescent Freudian stew involved.)

Highlander is an emblematic Hollywood popcorn flick, all hot air and explosions, too much sugar and too much salt. It is a high concept movie in which superficially ‘cool’ concepts are arranged in a vast and teetering pile, until everyone involved is dizzy and nauseous with altitude sickness. In no particular order, it confronts the viewer with a rain-slicked and neon ‘80s New York; Japanese katanas; swordfights in back alleys; smart, world weary cops; Highland battles in the bagpipe-skirling mists; Dutch angles and frenetic editing; Queen; Christopher Lambert’s slow and wonky smile; and Sean Connery’s eyebrows.

As with its VHS inheritance, Highlander belongs to the era of music videos; the director Russell Mulcahy made his name directing Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ and Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ and, perhaps most pertinently, The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, the video that launched MTV. It has been designed to work like a music video; its visuals are an accompaniment to something else. Not music (although Queen wrote songs for the soundtrack), but the viewer’s own imagination.

It is a vibe movie, and the vibe is ‘what a teenage boy thinks is cool’.

Delights

All of which, on rewatch, made me wonder why I had loved it so much back in 1986. Sure, I had been a Queen fan, but by 1986 I was starting to drift away from them because they seemed so uncool: mainstream music for stadium-rocking dads. And, admittedly, I was a Christopher Lambert fan, having already seen him in Subway (1985). But while Subway -- a product of the ‘80s French ‘cinema du look’ -- is a very shallow film, it is the Mariana Trench compared to Highlander.

The very shallowness of the film, the fact that it is little more than a vibe, is part of its appeal. Of course, I wasn’t immune to the swords and sorcery, the mean streets of gritty Manhattan, the sheer velocity and chutzpah of Mulcahy’s hyperactive directions. But all that high concept -- the secret society of immortals, the head lopping, the ‘Prize’ -- could easily have turned into an indigestible slop of exposition and lore. Sure, it opens with a voiceover, which is always a bad sign: someone, while viewing an edit, said ‘wait, what?’ and demanded that an explanation be included.

But it doesn’t need it. Highlander, very wisely, doesn’t care. It knows that it’s all just an excuse for the cool bits. No one watching this cares where the immortals come from; they just want to see swordfights. It is notable that the sequel, which did try and expound on the mythology, is widely considered to be one of the worst films of all time.

Disappointments

This is a film in which Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman who couldn’t speak English when filming started, plays a Scot. Sean Connery, a Scot who has never once attempted any accent other than his own, plays an Egyptian with a Spanish name. Clancy Brown, an American, plays an ancient steppe warrior named after a kind of burial mound. This film is not just stupid on the surface; it is stupid all the way down, through the script, the idea, the casting, the production and the motivation. Its stupidity is the only deep thing about it.

But it’s not malicious; it is gleeful, boyish. It is stupidly fun. Stupidly entertaining. Maybe even stupidly cool.

Can We Show The Kids?

So, here’s the thing: you don’t have to. You can just wait for the remake. Yes, a remake, starring Henry Cavill, Dave Batuista and Russell Crowe, is being remade right now. It is directed by Chad Stahelski, the man behind the John Wick movies. Which are, not incidentally, an artisanal blend of the very stupid and the very cool.

Which rather begs the question:

Why Are They Remakering This?

Well, for the same reason they’ve just made yet another sequel to Tron (1982), the same reason they’re making a new adaption of the toy-line-turned-Saturday-morning-cartoon Masters of the Universe (1983--85), and the same reason the Star Wars will continue until morale improves.

Like John Favreau (the man behind The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)) and Travis Knight (the director of Masters of the Universe (2026)), Chad Stahelski is Gen X. Our generation is now ‘in charge’ (for a given value of ‘in charge’; obviously, we’re not competent to run a major government or anything) and is busily revisiting our childhoods. Boomers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg recreated the Flash Gordon and Rider Haggard adventures they had adored as kids and gave us the Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and now we, in turn, are remaking them. We might be lazy and feckless, but on the other hand, we’re entirely artistically derivative.

Those ‘70s and ‘80s blockbusters created the ‘four quadrant’ model: a massively expensive blockbuster with something for everyone, and nothing of substance for anyone. But there was another model: the stupid VHS cult hit. Highlander was distributed by Cannon, the production-house-cum-financial-shenanigan that was a prolific creator of thick-eared nonsense to be rented from Blockbuster on a rainy afternoon: like Cannon’s original adaptation of Masters of the Universe (1987), Highlander was a commercial flop that was re-rented, rewound and rewatched over and over again.

Now, the mainstream cinema of the twenty-first century is a mixture of event movie and enjoyable genre trash: endless brand-extending multiverses of imponderable lore and impenetrable visual effects. There is not much that distinguishes Highlander from a mediocre Marvel movie. The technology has improved; beyond the windows of Connor Macleod’s apartment in Highlander there is an absolutely awful backdrop photo of Manhattan, while a Marvel movie will have a slightly unconvincing CGI rendering, and costume design, fight choreography and scriptwriting have improved immensely.

But while Marvel movies have resources that Russell Mulcahy could only dream of, these are, basically, the same film over and over again. A vaguely drawn McGuffin; a bunch of one-dimensional characters; some lumpy plot mechanics; and, most importantly, a huge pile of ‘cool’ stuff with which to overwhelm the viewer. When they said ‘there can be only one’, it turns out they meant there could be only one kind of film.

There were some slightly more successful high-concept action flicks in 1986, most notably Top Gun:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal to the teenager on your sofa about the teenager you once were? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

On December 1 1958, inventor and rube Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) arrives in New York. He finds a job in the mail room of Hudsucker Industries, then — as part of a plot by Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman) to depress Hudsucker stock — is almost immediately promoted to President. But Norville’s invention (the Hula Hoop) becomes an overnight success, upsetting Mussburger’s plans. Meanwhile, investigative journalist Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is trying to find out what’s going on at Hudsucker. Luckily, it’s the season for miracles, and everything is all cleared up at the stroke of midnight on December 31.

The Hudsucker Proxy isn’t the most obvious Coen Brothers film to show the kids. You might prefer to start with a bona fide classic like Fargo (1996), or one of the larky ones like O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). But it’s December, and The Hudsucker Proxy is a Christmas movie. More specifically, it’s a seasonal movie that parodies and celebrates other classic seasonal movies, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) to The Apartment (1960), taking in Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges on the way.

It was a big commercial flop. The Coens had had a string of critical successes with their first few films, culminating with three awards at the Cannes Film Festival for Barton Fink (1991). Following this, the echt Hollywood producer Joel Silver — the man responsible for Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and The Predator — decided to bankroll their next movie. They ended up with a production budget of something like $25 million, almost three times the budget of Barton Fink.

Quite what Silver thought he was getting for his money is anyone’s guess. What he actually got was a movie that manages to be simultaneously baggy and hectic. It is full of rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and exemplary visual storytelling, as in the bravura Hula Hoop sequence. It has all the Coens’ customary quirkiness and eclectic references. The story takes in stock fixing, mismatched romance and the invention of the bendy straw. It blends ‘40s magic realism with ‘50s corporate cynicism; the whimsy of Frank Capra with the fast-talking of His Girl Friday (1940); breathtaking, vertiginous deco production design with weird, comedic Gene-Kelly-style dream sequences. As Silver said to cinematographer Roger Deakins after watching the dailies: ‘What the fuck is this?’ (Or, as characters in the film remark every time there’s a ridiculous plot twist: ‘Hey, what gives?’)

The public sentiment was similar, and the film was a commercial disaster. (It was not helped by the direct comparison with the uber-successful and astonishingly cheap Four Weddings and a Funeral, released in the same year.) It is tempting to wonder what might have happened if the Coens had followed a similar trajectory to their old friend and collaborator Sam Raimi, who directed The Evil Dead (1981), helped write the script for Hudsucker, and directed that wonderful Hula Hoop sequence. In 2002 Raimi went mainstream with the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie. In a world where Hudsucker had been a vast success, might the Coens now be directing Doctor Strange movies for Marvel? Could we have had John Goodman as The Ancient One instead of Tilda Swinton? Steve Buscemi as Dread Dormammu of the Dark Dimension?

But in truth, this could never have happened. The Hudsucker Proxy was the movie the Coens had wanted to make; they had been planning for it and tinkering with it for years. This was their dream, and their dreams were and are not those of the American public. The Coens responded by returning to low budget indie production and making what is arguably their masterpiece: Fargo.

Delights

If it’s any consolation to Joel Silver, you can see where his money went. It’s there in the casting of genuine movie stars, most notably Paul Newman, who turns in a typically splendid performance as the cigar-chomping mogul Sidney Mussburger. Tim Robbins is perfect as a giant, goofy, genial idiot, and Jennifer Jason Leigh has honed her Rosalind Russell impression to a cutting edge.

As you would expect from the Coens, the film is also full of delightful character actors, including John Mahoney as a perfectly irascible newspaper editor, Bill Cobbs as a possibly magical timekeeper, and an absolutely unrecognisable Jim True-Frost as a manic elevator operator, a world away from his hapless Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski in The Wire.

The budget was also spent on a stunning model of mid-century Manhattan, all Atom Age skyscrapers and deco streamlining. Indeed, the model was so stunning that it has since been used in many other films, including The Shadow (1994) and Batman Forever (1995), two of the superhero movies the Coens might have ended up making in our parallel universe. (Warner Brothers sold the model to Universal for The Shadow, only to find that they needed to hire it back to make Batman Forever. This is exactly the kind of over-complicated financial footwork The Hudsucker Proxy satirises.) This re-use seems like the perfect metaphor for the movie’s ‘quotation generation’ re-appropriation of Golden Age Hollywood movies. It conjures the effect of seasonal channel surfing, creating an ideal gestalt of mid-century Christmas movies.

It also, naturally, has a terrific script, melding an accurate approximation of screwball cross-talk with an affectionate parody of period movie tropes, and adding the Coens’ usual relish for language and weakness for delightfully terrible jokes.

Disappointments

Of course, if you didn’t spend your childhood Christmases flicking through TV channels that were showing Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), and bingeing on Wilder and Hawks, then a lot of this is going to leave you cold.

The film also showcases the Coens’ perpetual reluctance to settle on a clear theme or tone. Their Gen X fans appreciate their penchant for splicing together wildly different approaches and sliding gleefully across genres, as if the canonical guidelines weren’t there. (Which, of course, they’re not.) The Coens’ eclectic approach makes sense to those of us whom Bob in Drugstore Cowboy (1989) calls ‘the TV babies’; raised in a saturated media environment, culturally omnivorous, endlessly curious. They are also insistent on leaving their films as texts to be interpreted, shy of providing any definitive meaning or argument. The audience can read them how they like, which is catnip to some (present!) but anathema to many.

You know, for kids!

So, can you show it to the kids? We showed it to a kid last Christmas; he was very taken with it, and immediately started trying to puzzle it out. This is partly because he is a child of a Metropolitan Editor, but it’s also because he and his brother were Coen Brothers fans already, having discovered for themselves The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). So, yes, you can show it to the kids, even the ones who have never heard of Preston Sturges. Which is pretty much all of them, I’m going to bet.

Is it still worth it?

Definitely. Not least because — given the sackfuls of substandard seasonal slop that get sicked onto the streaming channels every December — we need all the good Christmas movies we can get.

But it’s also worth it if you like reading too much into things, which we, evidently, do. This time, for instance, I was particularly struck by the recurrent symbols of circles, orbits and cycles. They’re hardly subtle, as in Norville’s famously idiotic sketch of a Hula Hoop; but I hadn’t quite noticed how deeply they permeate the script with ideas of rebirth, reinvention and eternal return. It’s tempting to see this theme as being an echo of the endless reruns of Christmas movies (re-runs that turned It’s A Wonderful Life from a flop into a classic).

But it’s also — obviously — about time, most clearly in the big Hudsucker building clock, the mechanism of which powers the climax of the film. This is another interpretation of one of the echt Christmas-movie plots: how should you spend your precious few orbits round the sun? Is your life on the right path, or will the equinoctial rebirth prompt a rebirth of your own heart, like Scrooge, and George Bailey, and C. C. Baxter?

The Hula Hoop was actually invented by the splendidly named Wham-O corporation, which was also first to market the Frisbee, Silly String and the Hacky Sack. Founded in 1948, Wham-O took the technological advances of the post-War military industrial complex, plastics and mass production, and turned them to frivolous jollity and pointless pastimes.

Their inventions are the perfect instruments for Norville Barnes, a man of glee and energy in the grey, reptilian world of Hudsucker Industries. Like It’s A Wonderful Life, the film seems to be asking: are you a Sidney J. Mussburger, a Mr Potter, sitting on a horde of gold like a dyspeptic dragon? Or are you a Norville, bringing joy to the world? A George Bailey, surrounded by friends? Do you want to be Joel Silver, churning out mindless multiplex filler, or the Coen Brothers, making mad little entertainments for mad little people?

At the end of the movie the universe (in the shape of Moses the janitor and the ghost of Waring Hudsucker) intervenes to set everything to rights. This is pure fantasy; just, you know, for kids. And this movie is set at Christmas, a time that is famously, you know, for kids. But if you can’t think optimistic thoughts at Christmas; if you can’t hope it’ll turn out alright in the end; if you can’t dream, like the Coen Brothers… when can you?

If you want to know how much I like The Hudsucker Proxy, try counting all the references to it in my Christmas story The Elf Service:

Christmas Stories

The Elf Service, Episode 1

All over the city children post letters to Santa Claus and they go undelivered and unanswered. Until Irving Jefferson founds the Elf Service, that is. The Elf Service is the story of charity, journalism and mayhem, the extraordinary story of an extraordinary young man, his extraordinary plan to make Christmas happen for the children of his city and all …

Read more

3 years ago · Tobias Sturt

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal to the teenager on your sofa about the teenager you once were? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

Devout Christian Sergeant Howie (Ewar Woowar) of the West Highland Police flies to the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate reports of a missing girl, Rowan Morrison. He is horrified to discover that under the leadership of Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) the island has abandoned Christianity and reverted to the worship of pagan gods. No one will help him in his enquiries, and he begins to suspect that Rowan has been abducted to be sacrificed on May Day. The truth, however, is even more horrifying than he imagined. Especially for him. Oh God! Oh Christ!

The Wicker Man is a folk horror movie. Indeed, it’s probably the folk horror movie. The two other key folk horror films from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s — Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) — are both period pieces. The Wicker Man, however, is set in contemporary ‘70s Scotland, and thus most perfectly exemplifies what the genre was about: the tussle between the modernist mainstream and the atavistic counter-culture.

The hippy youth of the late ‘60s had rebelled against state Christianity, consumerism, and the wipe-clean space-age aesthetics of the early decade. Instead, they embraced esoteric beliefs, environmental consciousness, and run-down farmhouses in the misty Celtic fringe. Folk horror plots dramatise this opposition using a recognisable template: a (masculine) figure (representing authority and reason) arrives in an out-of-the-way community. He discovers that the community has abandoned contemporary beliefs for something ancient, something identified with the rural, the feminine and/or the occult: pagan rites, disquieting magic. The incomer is set against the community in a struggle between Christian civilization and pastoral idolatry, the Apollonian and the Dionysian (see also The Secret History, of course).

In Blood on Satan’s Claw, the conservative traditional authorities win. They slaughter all the sexually promiscuous and heretical kids, as millions of sclerotic uncles had been wanting to do for a whole decade by that point. But in The Wicker Man, the forces of law and order are defeated by unorthodoxy and unreason.

A word of warning: I am going to assume, from this point, that spoilers don’t matter. This is because people tend to think one of two things about The Wicker Man: that it is a silly, old fashioned piece of hokum with irritating fiddle-di-dee music; or that it is something to be watched religiously at least once a year.1 You either don’t care, or you already know the plot and, indeed, all the lyrics to the ‘Maypole’ song.

Given the template for the folk horror plot, the film wrongfoots the viewer in at least two ways. The first trick is played on the audience via Sergeant Howie himself. He has come to Summerisle on the track of a missing girl, Rowan Morrison, but his investigation is curiously fruitless (pun intended, iykyk).2 Nobody has heard of her; nobody recognises her photograph. What Howie is discovering is that the whole village is entirely pagan. The local church has been abandoned; the children are taught magic in school; and the fields are full of locals rutting away in pale-bottomed slow motion.

Howie puts these things together with numerous dark mutterings about the May Day celebrations and how he ought to leave the island before they start, and concludes that Rowan has been abducted so that she can be sacrificed on May Day. The audience believes this too. That is how these films work, right? Especially cheap British horror movies from studios like Hammer and Amicus.

Wrong. There is indeed going to be a human sacrifice on May Day, but Rowan is merely the lure who draws the sacrificial victim to the island. Instead, the victim will be a symbol of authority and modernity, a practising Christian, and a virgin: it will be Sergeant Howie himself. He is anointed, bound, and burned up inside a giant wicker figure on the cliff tops.

The second twist, though, subverts the folk horror model in a more profound way. The film proposes that Sergeant Howie, despite his sea plane and smart police uniform, is not the figure of modern rationality he appears to be. Instead, it is his preferred form of mysticism that is outmoded. His Christianity is presented as an ancient belief, no longer fit for the times. His faith in both the Church and the law, and his inability to distinguish between the two, mark him out as a relic, a man without the cultural sensitivity and broadmindedness required by the ‘70s. Lord Summerisle explains that his grandfather invented their religion in the nineteenth century, apparently patching it together out of scraps of Fraser’s Golden Bough. Compared with Christianity, this is a contemporary religion for sexy modern people, a handy and practical faith for the new age.

Delights

Director Robin Hardy surprised the crew halfway through filming by announcing that the film was going to be a musical. It’s not, of course, but it includes a great deal of (all together now) diegetic music, a mixture of folk and pseudo-folk tunes composed by Paul Giovanni. It has a peculiarly and specifically ‘70s sound, evoking long embroidered skirts, corn dollies, and electric kettles decorated with wheat stalks and harvest mice. Anyone who was a small child at the time will have a deep atavistic response to the maypole scene, which is basically a ‘70s kindergarten music-and-movement session, all florid hand gestures and man-made fibre flares. Indeed, a great deal of the appeal of the film for me is glimpsing again those settings of my childhood. It is a montage of nostalgia triggers: Lord Summerisle’s mustard rollneck, the bare, smoke-stained walls of the pub, the Victorian oddments still moldering in forgotten corners.

Discomforts

This also includes a great deal of period nudity, including Britt Ekland’s stunt bum. Ekland had agreed only to top-half nudity in the scene where she lurches about her bedroom in the nip, testing Sergeant Howie’s chastity. So the crew waited until she was back in her trailer before getting someone else in to double as her bottom half.

To be fair, the film is relatively restrained with the (inevitably female-only) nudity. Even the girls jumping over the fire between the standing stones are wearing body stockings, despite Lord Summerisle’s advice: ‘It’s much too dangerous to leap through a fire with your clothes on.’ Overall it is (marginally) less sexist that most of its contemporaries, like Hammer Horror.

Can we show the kids?

Because you’re going to want to, aren’t you? The Wicker Man is about a forgotten population treasuring a lost culture in the teeth of contemporary mores; it is basically the story of Gen X’s midlife.

The film was reasonably well received and well regarded on release, but then largely disappeared from popular culture until it was ‘rediscovered’ in the late ‘80s by a younger audience. In 1988 it was the first film in Alex Cox’s BBC 2 cult film series Moviedrome, a screening that included some previously unreleased footage.

It has since acquired all the folklore that a cult movie must, including multiple different versions.3 It has become a touchstone for a certain kind of Gen Xer: one who has a treasured copy of the Reader’s Digest Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, watches the M. R. James ghost stories every Christmas, and owns a couple of Ghost Box records.4 And like all generational touchstones, it almost certainly looks like a weird pebble to everyone else. Its importance might be too dependent on its context to be fully comprehensible to someone younger. If you need any further convincing of this, I refer you to the comments below my piece on Easy Rider.

Also, you’d have to be willing to sit next to your child as, on screen, the pub listens to Britt Ekland taking a teenager’s virginity and Christopher Lee soliloquises at a pair of snails slimily writhing over each other.

Is it still worth it?

There is a moment in her nude scene when Britt Ekland breaks the fourth wall. She has been writhing about her room, throwing herself sexily against the walls. Her bottom double has beaten, sexily, against Sergeant Howie’s door; Britt herself has sexily caressed some furniture and a picture, and then is momentarily caught without anything sexy to do and so tries to sexily fondle a stone homunculus. This is something that eludes even Britt’s formidable sexy-fondling talents.

Then, though, she looks straight up at us. The camera, caught out in its prurient peeping, recoils, backing out of the window to hang in mid-air, as Britt advances on us, still holding our gaze, singing:

Please come
Say how do
The things I’ll show to you?
Would you have a wondrous sight?
The midday sun at midnight

This invitation implicates the audience in the homunculus fondling. We too, like Howie, are invited to cross the border into this other world. Watching a film, singing an enchantment, praying to a god; these are all similar actions of imaginative and spiritual endeavour.

Lord Summerisle is very clear that his grandfather made up the faith the islanders follow. Here, the film is being admirably honest about the Victorian reinvention (and often, just plain invention) of British folklore and ‘traditional’ practices. Many of the references on which the film draws were patched together in their time; now the film patches them together anew. (Even the wicker man of the title is of dubious provenance. It comes to us via Caesar, who was in the process of conquering the Celtic tribes himself, and was therefore keen on any story that presented them in a bad light.) The film is suggesting that if one man can patch a religion together out of odds and ends of lore, then anyone can do it. How many of the ancient religions were founded by someone casting about for a decent god to motivate the farmers? How about this Canaanite storm god, Yahweh? He seems like a good bet. Might go the distance.

But the film isn’t really making an argument about specific religions. It’s careful to depict both sides as flawed: Sergeant Howie is intolerant, but upholds the law; the villagers are permissive, but homicidal. The important note is that Lord Summerisle knows his religion is fake, and yet still believes in it. Indeed, he believes in it so fervently that he is willing to sacrifice a policeman to gods invented by his grandfather. The film is saying something profound here, not about religion but about human nature and stories.

Our life is spent in stories. Our perception of the world is mostly made up in our brains, with just a little sense-checking. Our cognitive biases are stories that we use to make sense of too complex a reality. We know we can’t believe our eyes, and yet we trust them anyway. We know fiction is untrue, and yet we suspend disbelief. Or rather, we have to suspend belief in order to remember that fiction is untrue. Deep in the most fundamental parts of ourselves, we are unable to distinguish between the fictions our brain makes and the fictions it consumes. Our bodies react as if the unreal was happening. Involuntarily, we smile at the lovers on screen, tense for the thrills, jump at the scares. Some of us — it seems unlikely, but all things are possible — may even become aroused by Britt Ekland tentatively pawing a homunculus.

We watch a silly and old fashioned piece of hokum with irritatingly fiddle-di-dee music, and engage with it so fully that it becomes a cult of its own.

Revered by a certain slice of Gen X almost as much as The Wicker Man: Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

A rockmentary following the British band Spinal Tap on a disastrous tour of the States. Founding members David St Hubbins (Michael McKean), lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) variously play gigs, fall out, get back together and lose drummers in weird accidents. The tour is a disaster but, it turns out, they are now ‘big in Japan’.

The rockumentary is, of course, a mockumentary. Spinal Tap aren’t a real band and the whole thing is a comedy about a group of self-deluded and very stupid musicians, fumbling about at the bottom of the record bins. It is simply presented as a documentary, with much praise being heaped, over the years, on cinematographer Peter Smokler, who was a documentary camera man and who keeps a sense of cinéma vérité to the whole thing.

But then it is really a documentary after all. A documentary not about a rock group but about a group of improv comedians pretending to be a rock group. The team, including director Rob Reiner, had rough outlines of scenes or incidents but all the dialogue was improvised during filming, so that Smokler was genuinely capturing a live event as it happened in front of him.

Obviously some of the structure of the movie was planned ahead and some elements were added in the shooting, such as the introduction of David St Hubbins’ girlfriend Jeanine in an effort to generate a narrative, but there was plenty that was just made up as they went along.

The convention is that a film is made three times: first on the page, second on the sound stage, third in the edit. Spinal Tap was therefore only made once. It joins a number of notable films, such as Annie Hall (1977) and Star Wars (1977), that became that notable only in the edit.

This improv comedy tradition is not something we really have in the UK, and certainly didn’t at the time. Rather than the Second City, SNL, Hollywood pipeline, we had the University revue, Edinburgh Fringe, TV show journey that gave us things like The Comic Strip, a Channel 4 strand of comedy movies made by Peter Richardson and usually starring some combination of Young Ones.

By a weird coincidence, at exactly the same time as Spinal Tap was being filmed, The Comic Strip were making their own mock/rockumentary Bad News On Tour (1983), also about an inept and very stupid heavy rock band going on tour. The comparison between the two tells you a lot about the differences between British and American culture in the early ‘80s, not least the fact that the Bad News tour is a lot smaller and cheaper than Spinal Tap’s and only lasts for the 30 minutes of a TV show rather than a full feature movie. Just the difference in scale of finances and possible ambition is striking.

Also, though, Bad News On Tour is much more evidently written than Spinal Tap. There is evidently a fair amount of improvisation, but scenes are more obviously shaped as jokes and there is a lot more business around the act of documentary making - another layer of meta narrative is created on top of the fiction.

It is tempting to see this comparison between improvisation and scripted comedy as one of personal freedoms compared to class-ridden hierarchy. The American project arises from a disparate group working together to make something extraordinary, while the British actors do as they’re told by the writer and the director.

You could equally, though, frame as the democratic socialist Europeans all pulling together in their own roles, compared to the American individuals all fighting like rats in a sack for the big laugh line that will end the scene. Certainly on rewatch you can begin to see the moments different members of Spinal Tap catch each other by surprise or sit on someone else’s joke.

Discomforts

What’s wrong with being sexy?

Look, the plot line with Jeanine is a little uncomfortable, reminding one, as it does, of the bile that has been heaped on Yoko Ono over the years, which was always largely sexist and racist in origin. The final shot of her, being cowed by Tap’s cricket bat toting manager Ian is a little squirm inducing.

On the other hand, that’s the joke, after all. Of course, if they’d been the ones smelling the glove, that would have been ok.

Delights

We’re not going to rehearse the jokes here, because we all know them anyway, and the spot on parody of the music is much remarked on. Also, as a teenaged Queen fan, the accuracy of the parody was more of a discomfort, to be honest.

So we’ll just draw attention to the English accents that McKean, Guest and Shearer do. Americans tend to sound more like Dick Van Dyke or Johnny Depp when they try to do an English accent, but these three are really amazingly good. I thought they were English the first time I saw the film. Mind you, while Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest was born and largely raised in the States, he is a member of the British aristocracy, so that may have helped with the mockney.

Can we show the kids?

We actually watched this with a kid who enjoyed it, although he did caveat that with ‘not the funniest thing I’ve ever seen’. Spinal Tap is definitely one of those films in danger of being suffocated by its own legend. In the mid ‘80s, its very existence as a mock documentary, its playing around with form and reality, was a marvellous thing; in a media saturated twenty first century, where the mishaps of idiots are broadcasted at us in a never-ending stream, it feels less magical.

Is it still worth it?

The bit that today feels the funniest is the post-credit sequence, which is just a selection of banging one-liners, like a really short edition of The Fast Show. It’s certainly got my favourite bit: Nigel Tufnel trying to imagine what it might be like to work in a hat shop. ‘Would you...what size do you wear, sir?’ Something about Christopher Guest’s innocent, enthusiastic performance is utterly charming. More relevantly, it's a scene I think of every time I wonder what I’m doing with my ‘career’ (in the sense of running downhill at high speed, out of control): ‘No! We’re all out, do you wear black?’

This is why we want to show these films to the kids, after all, because they have become, through rewatching, an intrinsic part of our own history, of ourselves. And of our social identity. At the time, in the ‘80s, the only way you found out about cult films like Spinal Tap, was because someone told you. Someone mentioned it in an interview in NME, someone quoted it in conversation, someone, four pints and two spliffs in, demanded that everyone watch it.

From there the dialogue from the film became part of your dialect, interwoven into how you speak to each other. One of your friends tries something new and another pipes up with ‘hope you enjoy our new direction... Derek Smalls, he wrote this’; a particularly idiotic opinion might be greeted with a ‘It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever’, an enthusiastic welcome at a party might elicit a ‘Bobbi Fleckman, hostess with the mostest!’

These quotations aren’t supposed to be funny, they’re simply social markers, the equivalent of the dog licking my elbow when it's sticking out from under the covers, a little reminder that ‘hello, I am here and we are part of the same gang’. As a result a rewatch soon stops being a viewing of a film and becomes a celebration of that social relationship, of the history and experience of that friendship.

At the climax of the film the estranged David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel reconcile on stage, reclaiming their childhood friendship and arrested adolescence, standing side by side happily playing their stupid songs. We realise in that moment that the point isn’t the band, the band is just an excuse for the friendship. As doomed drummer Mick Shrimpton puts it: ‘As long as there is, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock’n’roll.’

This is what cult movies like Spinal Tap are really for. Those acts of friendship that we do not face-to-face but side-to-side, something that is an unacknowledged and unremarkable performance in intimacy, a revelling in each other’s company and mutual weltanschauung.

Of course it helps if you also have a tiny model of Stonehenge to dance around, too.

Speaking of ludicrous rock n’ roll, here’s Dame Frederick and the boys:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

Idiot DJ Zack (Tom Waits) is a fuck-up who is arrested when the car he is driving for someone else is discovered to have a dead body in the boot. Fuck-up pimp Jack (Jon Lurie) is an idiot who is set up to be caught in a room with an under-age girl. The two fuck-ups are slung in a New Orleans prison, where they bicker and fight until they are joined there by a sparky, competent Italian tourist Bob (Roberto Benigni). Bob proceeds to cheer everyone up, organise a prison break and guide them all through the bayou to safety.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the beginning of Down By Law. Only slightly more than the number of times I’ve woken up to the sound of Tom Waits’ ‘Tango Till They’re Sore’ over the end credits, signalling that it’s time to go to bed.

This was, in my early ‘20s, one of the few films that I owned on VHS and consequently a regular choice for post-pub viewing. Skin up to the sound of ‘Jockey Full Of Bourbon’; recite dialogue along with Rockets Redglare and Vernel Bagneris (‘I’m serious as cancer, Jack’, ‘A few moments of your vewy vewy vawuable time’), and fall asleep to Waits and Lurie arguing in a jail cell. Which meant that I fell asleep about 45 minutes in, almost half way through: just as Roberto Benigni entered and the whole film changed.

The film pivots on this moment. Up until this point it has been at the most wryly humorous, but not really funny. It has been set in a seedy, sweaty New Orleans underworld, threatening danger and corruption. This is not a true underworld; like many contemporary indie film-makers, and like many that followed him, Jarmusch’s film happens in his own parallel universe. It’s not a hermetic diorama (like Wes Anderson’s world) or unpredictably violent (like the Coen Brothers’s world); but, like theirs, it is doggedly alternative and frequently marginal. It is artistic, it is beatnik. It is cool.

To a seventeen year old in 1986 Down By Law seemed almost impossibly cool. Tom Waits was obviously, canonically cool; John Lurie, with his great horse face and expressive be-ringed hands was like a big tiki mug full of cool. The crumbling back streets of New Orleans were exotic; the music was intoxicating (see Tom Waits, above); the dialogue was full of snappy slang; and all the clothes were amazing. Especially Tom’s shoes.

Seen now, though, this underworld is obviously parodic, often painfully so. The dialogue frequently verges on the awkward, and serious subjects – such as prostitution and paedophilia - are played for low comedy. The characters are frequently unpleasant, while remaining too stupid and pig-headed to recognise their own unpleasant pig-headedness.

But this, literally and metaphorically, is where Roberto Benigni comes in. For a start, he turns the film into an outright comedy. When we first meet his Italian tourist Bob, as he stumbles across a drunk Zack and regales him in broken English, he threatens to be a one-note (if delightful) comedy foreigner. However, once properly in the film, Benigni pantomimes Bob’s inarticulacy with extraordinary intelligence, heart and impeccable comic timing.

But Bob also changes what the film is about: or, rather, he reveals its true intent. Jack and Zack are not cool;, they just want to be. Bob, who does not care one whit about being cool or a criminal or antisocial, is the truly cool one. Not only is he the only one who has actually committed a crime (he accidentally killed a man in self defence), but he is the only one who is sorry for it. He is also the only one who can get them out of prison and then out of the swamp. He is the only one who can cook, have fun, and find love. He’s the adult. He’s the cool one.

Tom Waits’s shoes are indeed cool, Jarmusch is telling us; but there is more to life than a pair of chrome toe-tips.

Discomforts

The world of Down By Law is not overpopulated by women, and the few who exist there are not entire characters. Ellen Barkin is given some screaming to do; Nicoletta Braschi doesn’t even get that. Billie Neal has some lines, but has to deliver them with her top off.

And some of the unpleasant underworld is a little too real. Rockets Redglare, who plays a pimp, was a real life punk scenester and criminal who claimed to have killed Nancy Spungen, making his performance not so much creepy as skin-crawling.

Delights

We’ve done a whole piece on Tom Waits, so we don’t have to rehearse that here, but the rest of the soundtrack, by his co-star John Lurie, is also brilliant.

And so are the visuals. The cinematographer was Robby Müller, who was also cinematographer on Paris, Texas and Repo Man. His appearance in the credits of movies is usually a sign they’re going to be beautiful and also probably interesting.

In the case of Down By Law he enthusiastically embraced Jarmusch’s choice of black and white, not just for the inevitable film noir resonances, but also because, apparently, New Orleans and the bayou were simply too beautiful. He felt all the colour would distract from the characters and since the characters were the heart of the story, black and white it was.

Can We Show The Kids?

I can think of at least one kid who I strongly suspect, like twenty-something me, wouldn’t mind wearing some of ‘Uncle Luigi’s clothes’, the splendid thrift store outfits that Jack and Zack cobble together out of leftovers in Nicoletta’s cafe:

Is it still worth it?

Yet another film that has completely changed in the years between watching it in my twenties and watching it in my fifties. Weird how that keeps happening.

There are lots of different explanations for the title. Jarmusch said it meant to be good friends and to look out for each other. Obviously there is the connotation of being brought down by the law, and finding that camaraderie in prison. There is also a suggestion that it means to be held down by force of circumstance, or, indeed, the laws of physics, which, after all, are largely responsible for most of the down round here.

But there is also ‘down’ in the sense of ‘unhappy’. Both Zack and Jack are down at the start of the film. They have to be; it is the law. It is the law of cool, to be world weary and cynical and disappointed. This is perhaps what I responded to in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, that adolescent sarcasm meeting the cultural scepticism of Generation X and seeing reflected in these two losers who were so adamant on their own independence and never selling out.

And never quite noticing they were losers.

Bob, on the other hand, is happy. He is funny, both deliberately and inadvertently, because he is happy. And he is happy because he is fully engaged in the world.

One of Bob’s distinguishing features – indeed the first we see of him, even before his face – is an English phrasebook in which he writes down all the strange things these foreigners say to him. The first thing we hear him say is a sentence read out from his notebook: ‘It is a sad and beautiful world.’ This is Jarmusch telling us precisely who Bob is. He takes note of the world, recording its beautiful strangeness and its strange beauty. He sees it clearly, its disappointments and its glories. Bob, who is obsessed with poetry, has the poet’s habit of noticing. He has none of the cool distance of Jack or Zack; he is warm and he is in touch.

This is what’s truly cool, Jarmusch wants us to know. After all, Bob is the person who genuinely lives the life of a cool movie hero: he kills a man with his incredible skill in throwing pool balls (‘8 ball, very good ball’); he engineers a prison break; he catches, prepares and cooks a rabbit with his bare hands. He does these things not with studied detachment, but with enthusiastic engagement; and he is capable of these things because of his enthusiastic engagement, his interest in making friends in bars, watching foreign films about prison breaks, and learning to cook with his mother.

Both Jack and Zack are caught in pretences. Jack practises his self-consciously cool pimp lines; Zack puts on a DJ voice because it’s the only way he can express himself. Only Bob is genuinely himself, and can thus become the thing Zack and Jack are pretending to be: a whole, grown-up man.

He is still a very weird man; this is a Jim Jarmusch film, after all, and Jarmusch’s world is full of the alternative and the marginal because that is core to his world view. We should be taking note of what’s in the margins; we should be open to experiences beyond the usual. It is a sad world, but it is also a beautiful one, if we stop to notice; and beauty can arm us against sadness. That, and some ice cream.

Ice cream is definitely cool.

One of the other films I owned on VHS, another monochrome visit to a parallel world, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

A day with the aimless 20-somethings of Austin, Texas in 1989. There is no plot and, seemingly, no point. We follow various artists, hipsters and other low-energy low-lives, eavesdropping on their conversations for a moment, before becoming bored and following someone else instead. This happens repeatedly as morning becomes afternoon, and afternoon becomes night, and nothing continues to happen.

The story of Slacker – that is, the story of the artefact itself – belongs firmly to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It was shot on 16mm film for $23,000; the crew was fed on peanut butter sandwiches made by the director, Richard Linklater, who had previously made exactly one experimental feature-length movie. Then, Orion acquired the distribution rights and paid for it to be re-edited and blown up to 35mm for cinematic release, which enabled Linklater to take it to the Sundance Film Festival, at which point Slacker stopped being a no-hope passion project and became a cult classic.

It’s now seen as one of the trailblazers of the ‘90s explosion of independent film-making: the movement that gave us Tarantino, the reinvention of US cinema, and that habit that Marvel movies has of recruiting promising indie directors and then not letting them do anything interesting.

The action within the film is also very much of its time, and of interest almost exclusively to its fleshy geographic contemporaries. Its premise – the choice paralysis of being in your ‘20s, when so much seems possible while simultaneously evading your grasp – is widely applicable to young adults in relatively affluent societies. But Slacker is rooted both in 1989 and in the US; a time and a place in which entertainment and connection were not available at the tap of a screen, the means of expression were expensive and hard to come by, and the mainstream culture was stultifying and conservative. The day-to-day life it portrays is full of empty moments. There is little to do; what there is to do is boring.

It’s one of the first post-Cold War movies, shot in the months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A generation that has grown up expecting to be vapourised by mad old generals at any moment has suddenly been given a reprieve, and demonstrably does not know what to do with their wild and precious lives (as we absolutely did not refer to them, or indeed think of them). Capitalism has won; history, as Sellars and Yeatman say of the Second World War, has come to a .1 (Slacker’s premier at Sundance in January 1991 coincided with the beginning of Operation Desert Storm; or, as we now call it — while sounding like some visionary crone giving exposition in a sci-fi film — the First Gulf War.)

One of the repeated themes of Slacker is conspiracy theory. In one early sequence a man waiting for a friend is waylaid by a man in a Batman t-shirt who babbles about people trafficking. When he tries to escape Batman follows him home, outlining an increasingly baroque theory involving Mars bases, Nazi anti-gravity drives, CIA-sponsored abductions, and the creation of a pliant extra-terrestrial workforce via ‘psycho-surgery’. Later there’s a JFK shooting aficionado (this is Texas, after all) and a TV-obsessed media jammer who is convinced that broadcasts are being censored.

Conspiracy theories were a consistent theme of the period; this was, after all, the decade of the X-Files. To some extent they were the inevitable product of Cold War paranoia and actual political subterfuges such as Watergate. But these are pre-internet conspiracies, which now seem slower and more arduous and kind of cute, the product of boredom rather than self-reinforcing industrial-scale madness spreading at sub-atomic speeds. Their function was to lend an enchantment to the mundane, promising a world full of strangeness and mystery rather than just dead-end jobs and McDonald’s franchises.

Linklater mostly plays these scenes for laughs. All of this, indeed a lot of the film, looks a good deal less amusing now. It’s kind of shaming, looking back, to notice that no one in Slacker appears to have a full-time job. Coasting on grants and parental gifts and bar work, they are nevertheless comfortable enough to spend their time discussing the morality of charity rather than worrying about how much of the world’s land surface is literally on fire.

Delights

There is a lot of skill on display in the structure and direction of the film. It pulls together many different elements, collaging and collecting the overlooked and the undervalued to create a gestalt of a culture. Linklater’s camera is quiet and removed, but nevertheless exerts a strong editorial presence. It intentionally imitates a documentary camera, and anticipates the performatively still and passively ironic viewpoint of ‘90s quasi-documentaries like Patrick Keillor’s London (1994) and TV shows such as From A to B.

But the chief delight, inevitably, is seeing my own youth again.

The trailer gives the dictionary definition of ‘slacker’: ‘Someone who evades duties and responsibilities.’ When you’re an over-educated and over-indulged 20-something, that sounds pretty good: duties are cultural constructs enforced by imperialist patriarchies, and responsibilities are social shackles. (Some of this gets a little too close to home. One sequence in which two guys discuss how The Smurfs indoctrinates kids with images of conformist family life reminded me slightly too much of the piece I wrote about The Clangers.) Having stormed the barricades, the ‘anti-authoritarian’ Boomers were now in the executive suites, up to their ears in cocaine and on the phone to their estate agents. What was there left for us to do? We knew (we thought) everything, and believed very little.

We weren’t yet called Gen X in 1990; Douglas Coupland’s book came out a year later. But finally, we had a name for ourselves. Among my friends at least, ‘slacker’ felt like a perfect self-descriptor: perfectly sardonic, perfectly self-deprecating, perfectly self-protecting, perfectly true.

The movie catches that moment of cultural freefall. It starts with a perfect little plot in which a woman is killed in a hit-and-run by a mystery driver. But the mystery is immediately resolved: the driver was her son, and the police arrive and arrest him. And then we’re off, following a busker who witnesses the arrest. I could show you a conventional plot, it says, but I’ve decided to do something less interesting instead.

The subsequent vignettes are heavily self-aware. Characters constantly discuss the difficulty of doing nothing: ‘Who's ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?’ We watch actors give performances of self-consciously performing members of the most self-consciously performative generation. It’s as perfectly meta as any slacker could hope for.

Discomforts

All these conversations about boredom and pointlessness can get, well, boring and pointless. Being young is often boring and pointless, but one is not usually anxious to recreate that experience.

Can we show the kids?

You can show it to them, sure. You can tell them it’s educational, like one of those living history experiences in which kids get to work the till in a Victorian sweetshop or watch a Bronze Age farmer's wife grind millet.

They’ll probably give up on it pretty quickly though. The problem with being performatively boring is that other people tend to lose interest.

There is a sequence about halfway through in which a group of young kids demonstrate a trick for getting free cans from a soda machine. They then sell the cans to a lumpen group of aimless slackers who dismiss them as ‘budding capitalist youth’. It’s kind of painful to realise that these kids are Millennials.

Is it as good as you remember?

Even if you find the whole thing self-indulgent and dull, Slacker is an extraordinary and unique piece of work. I don’t know of anything else that uses quite the same fictional documentary approach, collected into a free-flowing, narrative-free experience. Thirty-five years after its release, it still feels innovative.

And anyway, I don’t find it self-indulgent and dull at all.

In the summer of 1989 I was on a road trip across the States with some friends. I was by far the least interesting and intelligent person in that car, and was very much a bystander to my own life. We passed through Austin, where we slept on someone’s floor; I have no idea whose. The whole world had become a blur of indistinguishable artists, hipsters and low-energy low-lives. At some point, the decision was made to go and watch a new film that everyone was talking about. That film was Slacker.

As we came out of the cinema afterwards, the actual conspiracy theorist in the Batman t-shirt walked by, monologuing at his companion, just as he had in the movie. We went home and stayed up all night talking about it: talking about the talking, analysing its analysis, discussing how self-referential we were being in discussing how self-referential it was. And when I watch it now, my own youth is playing back at me: self-referential to the last.

It is as difficult for me to be objective about Slacker as it is for me to be objective about myself; slightly harder, if anything, because Slacker doesn’t have twenty-something me in it, and so is a great deal more enjoyable.

I had a Super 8 camera with me on that trip, filming odds and ends across the States. Back at university the following term, I borrowed a video camera from someone to make a documentary about my friends and associates, very much in thrall to Slacker. But I didn’t go on to do anything much with my film-making ambitions. I read Slacker as a valorisation and endorsement; what I failed to notice was that to make it, Linklater and his friends had scrounged equipment, maxxed out credit cards, found solutions, turned on a dime. They had worked incredibly hard to capture the aimless and the bone-idle.

On the other hand, another way to read the movie is as a portrait of ‘scenius’, a word Brian Eno coined as an antidote to the myth of the lone genius. As Eno points out, most of the people we think of as creative individuals are part of a ‘scene’, a group whose members all contribute something to resulting innovation, even if that’s ‘only’ discussion and imaginative involvement. As the artist Austin Kleon pointed out: ‘Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute — the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.’

Linklater’s movie is a portrait of the Austin scenius at a particular moment. And if you look very hard, you’ll notice a wandering gormless Englishman in the background, contributing something. Maybe. Just a little bit.

For more on the exquisite tedium and horror of being young in the ‘90s:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

Ruthless millionaire Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) has plans for Gotham City. He aims to oust the mayor with his own candidate: celebrity orphan Oswald Cobblepot (Danny DeVito), otherwise known as The Penguin. And when his secretary, Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) finds out just what his plans are, he pushes her out of a window. But all is not plain sailing: The Penguin has plans of his own; the fall turns Selina into a vengeful Catwoman and there’s one more fly in the ointment. Well, a bat in the ointment really. A Batman to be precise (Michael Keaton).

After his Batman (1989) was a massive hit, director Tim Burton was able to get far more creative control for the sequel. One thing he insisted on, was filming in the States instead of Pinewood in England. He felt that filming the original there meant that it “suffered from a British subtext”.

This is ironic, to say the least. There is a lot of ‘British subtext’ in Batman Returns. The title of the film suggests the influence of American Frank Miller’s 1986 smash hit graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, in which an aged Batman comes out of retirement to hit kids, sneer at Superman and blow up the Joker. Miller’s book was one of first mainstream, ‘adult’ graphic novels and had a huge influence not just on Batman or superheroes but on comics as a medium.

It certainly had a huge influence on Burton and informed the first Batman (1989) film, giving it that ‘grim n’ gritty’ tone that so shocked viewers who only knew Batman from the ‘60s Adam West TV show and the toy aisle.

But not that grim n’ gritty, let's be honest. Certainly not compared to Miller’s comic, which while being an absolute tour-de-force of visual storytelling, is extraordinarily hard-boiled and po-faced. Burton’s movie is none of those things, embracing the fundamental silliness of Batman and his world as much as it does its fundamental coolness.

What Batman Returns is more like is British writer Alan Moore’s 1988 Batman story Killing Joke. Moore had been the first up the beach in the great British invasion of American comics of the ‘80s. Writers like Moore, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison, along with artists like Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Kevin O’Neill and Alan Davis had a massive impact on mainstream American superhero comics, infusing them with the punk sensibility of British anthology comic 2000AD and a more self-aware, archly literary, European approach to making comics.

Alan Moore is a talented and intelligent writer, so much so that he now regrets Killing Joke: “I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty.” Nevertheless, it still does an excellent job of balancing the four-colour gothic of Batman with some genuine characterisation and psychological insight.

Plus it has an abandoned funfair and evil clowns, as every Batman story should have.

Batman Returns certainly does. The Penguin’s base is in a deserted zoo and his sidekicks are The Circus Gang, all machine-gunning acrobats and evil monkeys. It also occupies precisely the same space as Killing Joke, taking something silly seriously enough to pull at its hidden themes, while still delighting in its silliness.

There’s still a ‘British subtext’ to this Batman, an approach that undercuts the usual overwhelming, primary colour exuberance of the American superhero.

Delights

Like many superhero films that followed it, there are a lot of characters in Batman Returns, but the excellent performances mean that there are never too many. It's hardly a surprise to have Christopher Walken go big and weird, but both Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer know exactly what kind of film they’re in, taking precisely judged little bites of the scenery even as they temper their performances with subtle touches.

Keaton, on the other hand, is reined back: Batman is the still, enigmatic centre of the film, but he justifies Burton’s casting, of which so many were sceptical. His mobile and expressive face is put to great use behind Batman’s rubber mask.

Then there’s Danny Elfman’s music, featuring his Batman theme, which is up there with the best of John Williams as a leitmotif which becomes a starring character in its own right.

The real star, though, is designer Bo Welch’s Gotham City, an absolute masterpiece of quasi-gothic, fascist-inflected art deco. Welch took Anton Furst’s magnificent Gotham from the first film and developed it further, making it even more looming, dilapidated and monstrous.

The weird design approach that Burton adopted for his Batman films, an mutation of Gilliam’s ‘80s update of post-WWII Britain in Brazil (1985) (more ‘British subtext’), a world in which everyone dresses like it's the ‘40s but behaves like it's the ‘90s, allows a huge amount of leeway in production design, a gleeful mixing and matching of trends and signifiers that captures the exuberant inventiveness of the best comics artists.

Discomforts

Of course, what all this means is that Batman Returns is not like most superhero movies, certainly not like the twenty-first century Marvel Cinematic Universe. Burton hired Daniel Waters, the writer of Heathers (1988), a sardonic parody of teen movies, to write the script because Waters knew nothing about superheroes, and it shows. Instead of getting caught up in all the ludicrous lore, he simply tries to write them as characters. Silly characters doing silly things, naturally, but characters rather than plot tokens nonetheless. This gives the movie a distinct tone among superhero films.

And then there’s Burton’s own distinct tone. That little explosion of superhero films of the ‘90s, which followed the success of Burton’s Batman, Dick Tracy (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), The Shadow (1994), The Phantom (1996), for instance, are all highly camp, guiltily aware of their status as overblown kid’s films. None of them are taking their subject matter quite as seriously as Iron Man (2008) or Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), say.

Moreover, Burton’s camp is of a very specific kind. It is goth, and a specific kind of goth, to boot. The surprising thing about Siouxsie and the Banshees appearing on the soundtrack in the climatic party scene is that it's not The Cure. This is a self-aware, self-indulgent stripey goth, cosily dark and archly grim. A subculture of a subculture.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Batman Returns did not do as well as its predecessor. This was too dark and too weird for most people’s comfort.

Can we show the kids?

It was also too sexy for most people’s comfort.

As R S Benedict has pointed out, the aesthetic of the Marvel Universe is that ‘Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny’. It is all impossible plastic bodies with molded underwear being fruitlessly smashed against each other like action figures. There is chaste, awkward schoolyard romance but no sex.

In Batman Returns a woman dressed in skin-tight latex licks the face of a man trapped in a rubber corset and then stabs him with her metal fingernails. Batman and Catwoman cannot leave each other alone, while The Penguin stews in a sweaty welter of double entendres and inappropriate behaviour. The film is very aware indeed what all this dressing up and going out at night to grapple with strangers is about.

This made the movie too adult to be a kids film, while being too childish to be an adult film. It also made it tricky to sell toys.

Is it as good as you remember?

Yes. But that’s only because I remember it pretty well, as I watch it more or less once a year.

Here’s where I have to admit that I’m a Batman fan. I may have political problems with the conservative assumption that all cities are dystopian wastelands, full of freaks and ne’er-do-wells, and that the best thing that a billionaire can do to solve urban problems is put on a rubber suit and beat up the mentally ill, but come on. Let’s face it. Batman is cool.

He’s got a big cape and big cave. He’s got all the marvellous toys and the best rogue’s gallery in comics. He’s the World’s Greatest Detective and he can also go BIFF and POW. He is the night. He is the Batman. He is cool.

Part of what makes Batman cool is that he doesn’t belong. Like the plot of a Batman comic, he is lost in time. He was created by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson in the late ‘30s to capitalise on the popularity of Superman. Superman was a new kind of character, a superhero, but they made Batman out of bits of older, existing heroes, out of two fisted adventurers and puzzle-solving detectives. He is a creation of ‘30s pulp, a companion to The Shadow or Dick Tracy, a character from the world of wartime noir, of gangsters and corrupt political bosses and mad professors, of goons and flatfeet, of shadows and darkness.

These origins give Batman a deeply weird affect and Burton picks up on it. The movie has all the lurid horror of Jerry Robinson’s 40s strips and its Gotham is the vertiginous playground of Dick Sprang, the artist who drew a lot of Batman and Robin comics in the ‘50s, full of giant typewriters and jungle-gym roof-scapes. Most Batman movies since take place at street level, are full of car chases, but this movie understands that the city is to Batman what the jungle is to Tarzan. It takes place in a parallel, hidden world of sewers and rooftops, of gargoyles and balconies and crenellations.

It is, in my opinion, the best Batman movie ever made (the best Batman adaptation is, of course, Batman: The Animated Series (1992), as everyone knows). Burton perfectly captures the hallucinatory, fevered quality of the best superhero comics, the running wild of the imagination, the roiling of the unconscious. The movie both embraces the high camp and pulls to the fore the themes that run underneath it, the sex and politics and psychology.

For example, both villains in the movie are alternate, warped Batmen. They are also both versions of Donald Trump, to some degree, but that’s another story. Walken’s angrily greedy millionaire Max Shreck is what trust fund baby Bruce Wayne would be if he was just an ordinary rich guy, while The Penguin, tortured by other people’s perception of him, is what Batman would be if he was an ordinary monster.

What the film champions is how Batman and Catwoman embrace their inner monstrousness. They are weirdos, and by being weirdos, they are able to find a peace that, unexpressed, would make them into monsters like Shreck or The Penguin. It’s a film almost purposefully made to help goths feel good about themselves. No wonder I love it.

That, and the reason I watch it every year: it's a Christmas movie, an unashamed one, full of Christmas trees and presents and log fires and snow. Like Burton’s other seasonal movies of the period Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), it is the perfect goth Christmas.

As Bruce Wayne says at the end:

Merry Christmas, Alfred, and goodwill toward men. And women.

For more Christmas movies, there’s our piece on how they’re all about Dad:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

The crew of cargo-hauling ‘space truck’ The Nostromo are told to respond to a mysterious signal from an unknown planet. After one of the crew gets too friendly with an egg, an alien creature gestates inside him, resulting in a particularly gory ‘birth’. This Alien, getting increasingly toothy, picks off the crew one by one. Warrant Officer Ripley discovers that the crew had been tricked into responding to the signal, and that Science Officer Ash is a robot working for their corporate masters, who want a live specimen of the Alien. Eventually, with everyone but her dead, Ripley saves Jones the cat, kills the Alien and escapes.

Alien owes its existence to George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). When the latter was an unexpected global smash, Fox Studios were anxious for a follow up. And the only script featuring rocket ships they had hanging around was Alien.

The two films are very different in lots of ways. Alien is a horror movie, not a feel good adventure; it is grounded and ‘realistic’, rather than full blown fantasy; and while there is no sex in Star Wars, the titular character of Alien is a big walking pile of terrifying mutant genitals. But they also have more in common than you might think. Both are science fiction, obviously, and science fiction of a very particular type; both use set designs with a grimy, lived-in look. They are deliberately built to be the opposite of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), which is all gleaming white wipedown interiors. They are both also love-letters to B-movie sci-fi, taking situations and tropes from cheap movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s and reinventing them for an age blessed with more ambitious special effects. 

Most of all, though, both of them owe a lot to Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune (1966). With its desert planets, internecine aristocratic conflict and mysterious wizard clans Star Wars obviously borrowed a few tropes from the book, but Alien owes it a more direct debt. In the ‘70s, unhinged Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky was trying to get a film version of Dune off the ground (both Orson Welles and Salvador Dali were supposed to be in the cast). To this end he employed a crew of some of the best concept artists in the world to help him visualise his dream, including the French comics master Moebius (Jean Giraud), British painter Chris Foss – whose spaceships graced countless sci-fi paperbacks – and none-more-goth Swiss artist H. R. Giger. And an American called Dan O’Bannon, the man who would give birth to the Alien.

Along with director John Carpenter, O’Bannon had made a student film called Dark Star (1974), a comedy about a bunch of blue collar slackers working on a commercial spaceship. It was something of an underground hit, and O’Bannon was thinking about revisiting it as a horror movie, an idea which eventually became the first draft of Alien. When Jodorowsky’s magnificent dream fell apart, he found himself back in the States with the contact details of a group of brilliant artists.

One of Alien’s advantages is the absolutely stellar (pun intended) talent that was lavished on its design. Foss’s spaceship designs, industrial designer Ron Cobb’s interiors, Giger’s creepy biomechanoid landscapes and creature: these all work together to elevate a monster movie much higher than it had any right to be. As director Ridley Scott himself said, they were making a B-movie to A-movie standards. His visual ability coupled with that design reveal the strange depths beneath Alien’s apparently shallow pulp surface.

One way of thinking about pulp fiction is as the dreams of culture; it deals in the monsters that live inside our culture, usually unseen. The attention, craft and care lavished on Alien propels these hidden horrors into the foreground, where they are clear and horribly fascinating. Alien is the inchoate and chthonic terrors of the late ‘70s compressed down to a diamond and placed in a setting from which it is hard to look away.

Delights

The other reason why Alien is far better than it has any right to be is the standard of the acting. A canny mixture of British and American character actors - Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton - conveys that these are everyday working stiffs, not the hip young ‘space hairdressers’ of Star Wars (to paraphrase Malcolm Tucker). The ability of actors like Veronica Cartwright and Tom Skerrit to rattle through sci-fi technobabble with an offhand weariness is key to making the horror work. The setting needs to be believable if the alien intrusion into it is going to seem sufficiently uncanny.

A good deal of credit is also owed to Alan Ladd Jr., who was, at the time, Vice President of Creative Affairs at Fox. To be honest, a great deal of credit is owed to Ladd for many things, including getting Star Wars off the ground and making Blade Runner (1982) happen. In this case, though, as well as being a supporter of Alien, he made one crucial decision.

The script had been written with only surnames, with the intent of keeping the parts gender neutral. It was apparently Ladd who suggested giving the key role of Ripley to  a woman and thus, eventually, to Sigourney Weaver. This was her big break and her performance is terrific, all nervous steel. But having a female lead in a sci-fi film didn’t just change the way the film read, it changed the genre.

There are smaller delights too, too many to list, but my favourite is Ron Cobb’s ‘Semiotic Standard for all Commercial Trans-Stellar and Heavy Element Transport Craft’. As part of his work designing the spaceship interiors Cobb developed a whole suite of icons describing the functioning of the ship in ideogrammatic terms. You wouldn’t notice them on first watch; you might not notice them on twelfth watch, but they’re amazing. Not just as pieces of design, but as pieces of worldbuilding. As an example of the amount of thought and skill that went into trivial pieces of set dressing they are emblematic of the whole film’s approach. These tiny details matter because they add up to an all-encompassing sense of a real place and real lives, and they turn the movie into something extraordinary.

Discomforts

Well, it's a horror movie. And it’s a horror movie about biology. About, to a great extent, sex. The alien starts life as an egg, but an egg with labia, before becoming a pair of hands that clasp the victim’s face and orally violate them. That victim then becomes pregnant with a toothed penis that eats its way out of them before growing into a much bigger penis on legs that has, at one end, a vagina dentata, in which is hidden a penis dentata, with which it violently penetrates its victims.

Freud, in other words, would have a field day.

If he could be persuaded out from behind the sofa.

You admire it, don’t you?

I admire its purity.

Can we show the kids?

Can you? They should be made to watch it.

To be honest, I have no idea what a contemporary audience would make of Alien. It would probably be too slow for them; the Alien itself would probably be too obviously a man in a suit; and, crucially, such was its impact that countless films since have been influenced by and have paid homage to it. The ‘strong female lead’ alone is practically a cliche now. Too many films since Alien have imitated the designs and characteristics that initially felt innovative and exciting.

However, that’s probably why it should be watched. It exemplifies a certain moment in Hollywood history, and is key to understanding how contemporary popular film has ended up where it is.

Is it as good as you remember?

I can only repeat myself: Alien is far better than it ought to be. It is just a pulp sci-fi horror story, but it opens out those tropes to expose the philosophical problems they spring from. The Alien’s gruesome biology refers to the mind/body conflict in which rational self-consciousness is prey to base biological urges. The company that is willing to sacrifice its employees for a possible new revenue stream dramatises the dangerous interrelation between the individual and the (capitalist) system. The cosmic horror illustrates the insignificance of humans in a universe that is not so much indifferent as actively malign; a universe in which we are but fleeting specks who die in horrible ways.

It opens these things out so successfully because – like the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the man who is arguably the father of both pulp sci-fi and pulp horror – it is aesthetically irresistible. It is a uniquely cinematic experience, sensorially and experientially overwhelming. It demands and holds our attention, making us concentrate on these ridiculously but pregnant premises in a fully embodied and imaginatively engaged way. We wonder, we jump, we are engrossed and grossed out. We are trapped on that spaceship with the crew and the Alien, and we are forced to grapple with it.

What stands out about Alien is that this is not the work of a single, brilliant auteur. You can plausibly argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a Stanley Kubrick film. Like everything else he directed, it displays his style and his obsessions; and, like everything else he made, it is made interesting and important by his craft and attention. But Ridley Scott is not an auteur. There have been many films in the Alien franchise and it is noticeable that Scott, as director, is responsible for the very best, the original Alien, and probably the very worst, Prometheus (2012). (This does not include the Alien v. Predator movies, obviously.) Scott is an undeniably gifted director, but he is very much not Stanley Kubrick. Alien is not a Ridley Scott film.

Alien is a Hollywood film. It is the work of a dedicated team given just enough latitude. Hollywood money brought together a team of extraordinary individuals who built on each other’s strengths to create this fearsome object: persuasively performed, thoughtfully designed, beautifully directed, precisely edited, and machine-tooled to scare, delight and make money and memories.

Hollywood also imposed restrictions. There were layers and layers of producers, from Dan O’Bannon trying to protect his gruesome baby to Walter Hill and David Giler, who gave O’Bannon and Shusett a deal with their Brandywine production company and then started to mutate it (in the process giving us Ash, the robot, and thus the corporate paranoia that constitutes a deep strain in the lore of the Alien films). On top of that there were the studio producers, desperate to keep a young and enthusiastic Ridley Scott within budget. Stories are told of producers prowling the labyrinthine set, trying to get pieces torn down even as Scott encouraged his team to build yet more, just for detail’s sake.

But these restrictions are good. Creativity needs boundaries. As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out, tennis is no fun without the net. In pushing against restrictions, creativity is sparked and redoubled. Without restrictions you are left with nothing but self-indulgence (viz Prometheus).

The body horror works because of H. R. Giger’s design, but it also works because of the technological restrictions that meant that the monster had to be played by a man in a rubber suit (an unbelievably tall graphic designer called Bolaji Badejo). This in turn meant that like the malfunctioning puppet shark in Jaws (1975), the Alien couldn’t be fully shown; it had to hide in the shadows, lurching out of the darkness, making it increasingly mysterious and awful.

The capitalist horror works because of Ron Cobb’s obsessively branded interiors, his rendering of a corporately mandated workplace; and because of the performances, particularly Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton’s kvetching space janitors and Ian Holm’s literally soulless company man. The cosmic horror is lent strength by the fact that they didn’t have the motion control cameras that enabled Star Wars to have all its whooshing, zooming spaceships, so everything in space was rendered tentative and laborious. The cosmos is a dangerous place that has to be approached with caution and a manual.

Like the fictional corporation from the film, Weyland-Yutani, Hollywood has repeatedly tried to recapture and harness the power of Alien, and they have repeatedly failed. It is a glorious and uncontainable monster. Just as the Alien takes on the attributes of the creatures it gestates within, so the talent of the cast and crew leached into the eventual film. 

Just as Casablanca (1942), is the perfect example of the old Hollywood studio system working as it should, pushing together contract performers, directors, designers and musicians to make an unexpected and unwarranted gem, so Alien shows how the Hollywood of the ‘80s could still produce works of accidental art.

Alien star and indie movie stalwart Harry Dean Stanton has featured in The Metropolitan before. Because of course he has.

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

A polluted Earth’s last forests have been preserved by sending them off into space, where only Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) seems to care about them. When the order comes to destroy them, Lowell murders his crew mates instead and sets off towards Saturn with just three robots for company: Huey, Dewey and Louie. He cannot escape justice, however, and finally commits suicide with a nuclear bomb, leaving one forest to be cared for by Dewey as it drifts through the cosmos.

Silent Running was the directorial debut of Douglas Trumbull, who worked on the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), most relevantly on a sequence involving the planet Saturn. That sequence ended up being cut, but Trumbull continued working on the effects and they became the cornerstone of this film.

I probably first saw Silent Running on BBC1 on the evening of Tuesday, 27th December, 1977 (thanks, BBC Genome!). The date is important. 1977: the year of Star Wars. I was eight years old and was primed for anything featuring scale model spaceships cobbled together out of old Airfix kits. Silent Running lodged hard in my memory. Partly because the spaceships were fantastic; but mostly because of the unbearably cute ‘drones’, the robots Freeman Lowell nicknames Huey, Dewey and Louie after Donald Duck’s nephews. The drones were portrayed by amputee actors who used their hands as the robots’ feet and performed the wordless parts with pantomime expressiveness.

It’s interesting, then, that Silent Running — as a creative run-off from 2001 — is very much from a world before Star Wars. Its origins are obvious in its desire to be a film of ideas as much as a film of special effects. In Star Wars George Lucas was essentially adapting Flash Gordon, making a sci-fi adventure that owed more to swashbuckling romances like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) than it did to hard science depictions of space travel. Trumbull isn’t interested in laser swords and space dogfights; he wants to dramatise ‘70s ecological themes of pollution and deforestation.

Star Wars was the beginning of the popularising of science fiction. Fifty years later sci-fi is arguably the most successful genre in mainstream culture, something that can be dated to the release of the Star Wars prequels in 1999. But Silent Running is from a time when science-fiction was predominantly a low-budget, outsider-art genre, beloved of freaks and nerds. It is an odd little film stuffed with precisely the sort of peculiar imagery that lodges in an eight-year-old’s head.

Delights

There is a term of art in visual effects that particularly delights me: ‘greebling’. It means the addition of meaningless surface elements to models, usually models of spaceships: cables, boxes, random bits of pipework. (It is not necessarily a reference to Peter Cook, who had a character called Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling; but it captures how Cook would monologue by piling absurd detail upon absurd detail.) This was traditionally done by buying up model kits of armoured transports, battleships and steam engines, and raiding them for extra little knobbly bits that could be glued onto the outside of the Millennium Falcon or Battlestar Galactica or, in the case of Silent Running, the American Airlines spaceship ‘The Valley Forge’. The ultimate effect was so delightful that the real American Airlines wanted to take the model on tour to show it off (sadly, all that greebling was too fragile to be moved). But the real delight lies in the fact that the spaceship was identified as belonging to American Airlines at all.

In this it again follows 2001, in which scientist Heywood Floyd travels in an Pan-Am shuttle to a space station that has a Howard Johnson hotel onboard. This integration of real world brands into the science fiction milieu is an attempt to add veracity, to place us in a lived future. Silent Running goes further than 2001, in fact, because where the latter’s interiors were vacuum packed and gleaming white, Silent Running was filmed on board a decommissioned aircraft carrier, all exposed pipework and taped up repairs.

This gives the spaceship an interior as well as an exterior greebling, the feel of a real, practical environment. I can’t think of an earlier film that takes this approach, but it was quickly picked up. It can be seen in Star Wars itself and then in Ridley Scott’s pair of sci-fi masterpieces, the truckers-in-space aesthetic of Alien (1979) and the dystopian cityscapes of Blade Runner (1982). It is now the convention for sci-fi interiors. Only the sinister intergalactic empires have cleaners.

Discomforts

The key way in which Silent Running differs from 2001 is in not being very good. This was Douglas Trumbull’s directorial debut, and it shows. It is very much a movie made by a visual effects director, with lots of long shots of beautiful models followed by incoherent visual storytelling when it comes to the actual characters.

It’s not helped by a questionable script, despite the presence of TV legend Steve ‘Hill Street Blues’ Bochco and director Michael Cimino on the writing roster. The big twist of the movie is that Freeman Lowell — who reads about plants, cares for plants, is so obsessed with plants that he murders his fellow humans to save them — has forgotten that they need sunlight to grow. This is not a good twist. Bruce Dern is required to do an awful lot of wild-eyed monologuing to various pot plants and robots, especially after he has put a spade through all other potential interlocutors. And the less said about Joan Baez’s singing, the better.

So, can we show it to the kids?

If you think they can stand listening to Joan Baez warbling over footage of Bruce Dern in a homespun kaftan watching bunnies frolic in a geodesic dome in orbit round Saturn: why not? But this doesn’t seem likely, does it? There’s nothing essentially offensive in the film (murder apart). But in my experience, children of the twenty-first century are slightly impatient with the indulgences and longueurs of twentieth century cinema.

To be fair: while the twist is laughable and the dialogue whiffy, the core theme — the balance between human and ecological interests — is as relevant as it’s ever been. The forests have only been preserved through a kind of corporate greenwashing. They are scheduled to be destroyed solely because public interest has waned. The film is emphatic that Lowell’s murders are unforgivable, that he has tainted his outer space Eden. His ranting about how people need to stop eating ultra-processed foods becomes somewhat redundant when he starts killing people to preserve his allotment. 

For once there might be an argument for remaking a ‘70s sci-fi movie in the 21st century. Just as long as we keep the robots.

Is it as good as you remember?

Well, no, but what did I remember? The sweet little drones; the big greebly ships; the strange, doomed hippyish atmosphere. I saw it first through a Christmas haze of Turkish Delight and new Action Man accessories, and probably not again until it was shown on TV in the early ‘90s. And until that point all I had was a synopsis in Halliwell's Film Guide and some photos of the special effects production in Starlog magazine.

Of course, this happens a lot in childhood, when you are less in charge of what you’re watching; and it happened even more in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when we were all at the mercy of three channel schedulers who could shove on any old film on the telly on a Christmas afternoon, just as long as it contained no swearing, little nudity and not too much violence. With no opportunity to rewatch films, discover more about them, or, in many cases, find out what they were actually called, you were left with fragmentary but indelible images: the horrible pig-hybrid from O Lucky Man! (1973), the crash scene from The Appointment (1981), the ancient Martians hopping about in Quatermass and The Pit (1967).

You had the impression that you were only glimpsing things through a screen darkly; that there was, beyond your vision, a whole unseen world. Unlike the twenty-first century experience of being deluged with undifferentiated ‘content’ (itself quickly being drowned in AI slop), there was the sense of things being hidden, cultural objects yet to be discovered. That somewhere out there, there were undiscovered wonders and overlooked oddities and, perhaps, a forest in orbit around Saturn, tended only by a lonely robot with a dented child’s watering can.

For further televisual glimpses of strange movies, there’s always Hammer Horror:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

Teen nerd David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), showing off to potential girlfriend Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), mistakes a military computer for a games company and hacks into it. In turn, the military computer mistakes his game playing for the opening moves of World War III. For the world to be saved, David and Jennifer must track down the computer’s creator, Falken (Jon Wood), and persuade the AI that nuclear war is a very bad idea indeed. By teaching it to play noughts and crosses (alright, *sigh*, ‘tic-tac-toe’).

WarGames combines three existential terrors in one jolly teen romp: the destruction of society by amoral teen hackers, the destruction of culture by artificial intelligence, and the destruction of the species by nuclear armageddon. Of the three, in 1983 the first was the most novel. The Cold War was at one of its hottest pitches and World War III seemed imminent. Politely lethal artificial brains were a regular feature in films, just as jobs lost to automation were a regular feature in the news. But computers in the home? A new technology of unimagined power that only teenagers knew how to use? This was a whole new thing to be frightened of.

To be fair to WarGames, despite revolving around a teenager accidentally starting World War III it does not demonise personal computers as a threatening teenage craze. (Much.) Instead, it rather glorifies the teenage hacker; its audience, after all, was precisely those boys who were intending to change society, one line of BASIC at a time. David’s hacking gets him into trouble, but it also gets him out of it. He approaches both social systems and computer systems with inventiveness and psychological insight; these skills make him both a proficient hacker, and someone who eventually saves the world. It ends up having a surprisingly clear-eyed balance between pessimism over how technology can amplify humanity’s worst instincts, and optimism about how, as a tool, it might help us overcome them. 

And it has a remote control pterodactyl in it.

Delights

The film opens in a nuclear bunker, where a missile commander is quailing at the command to turn his key and launch armageddon. He is played by Jon Spencer, who played Leo in The West Wing. His junior officer is played by Michael Madsen. This film is thick with delightful ‘80s character actors, from James Tolkan (Back to the Future, Top Gun) to Barry Corbin (Northern Exposure), to John Wood (have we covered Ladyhawke yet? We need to do that), to Dabney Coleman.

The film is technically delightful, too. John Badham manages to keep everything light while also keeping it moving, which is an achievement when so much of the film is people staring at screens with an occasional break for typing. This is helped by a lovely sound palette of ‘computer noises’, hums and beeps and clicks that whirr away in the background, providing the metronomic pulse of a cursor blink. The computer displays in the NORAD situation room, meanwhile, are particularly beautiful: sparse ‘80s graphics that tell clear visual stories. This is probably because they were designed by Colin Cantwell, who also designed  the TIE fighter X-Wing for Star Wars and worked with Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sci-fi design royalty, in other words.

Most of all, there is the sheer ‘80s America of it all. It’s not that there’s a lot of ostentatious wealth or the promise of excitement; it’s that there’s so much ostentatious ease and the promise of safety. The suburb in WarGames is the ideal suburb, one that’s full of video game arcades and junk food, where both your parents work and you have a lock on your bedroom door. A place for wandering out of and running back to. The sheer comfort of it all. Even the clothes. You have no idea how comically hard it was to find a zip-up hoodie in the ‘80s Home Counties.

Discomforts

There are some unfortunate Hollywood nerds at one point, quacking and bickering in their basement: “Remember you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? You’re doing it right now.” But this is more than made up for by all the heroic nerds, including the protagonist.

More uncomfortably, it's a movie made largely for ‘80s suburban white boys, so it's perhaps inevitable that the cast is overwhelmingly white and male too. On the plus side this means that it is largely (accurately) white men who are trying to blow up the world.

It does also mean, though, that poor old Ally Sheedy is given little more to do than giggle and ask questions on behalf of the audience. So, not a great deal of overt misogyny (this is a kid’s film, after all) but an awful lot of structural.

Can we show the kids?

As a sort of lived history exhibit, possibly; maybe — if you can get them to put up with something so low on action and slow on editing — as an example of how today’s existential horrors aren’t that new.

Is it as good as you remember?

As a computer-obsessed 13-year-old myself, the appearance of the first Tron (1982) and then this was a significant one—two punch in my personal canon. Viewed from any other perspective WarGames isn’t a good film, but it’s decently made and surprisingly watchable 40 years later, even if that is through bifocals heavily frosted with nostalgia.

What distinguishes it now is its museum-quality preservation of a particular moment in time; an image of what it was like to be an adolescent in the early ‘80s, to grow up under the constant threat of annihilation, to suspect that if you did make it to 30, it would be as a mutated scavenger in an irradiated wasteland. What was the point, then, of trying to grow up at all? Especially when we had the relentless output of the consumerist-entertainment complex with which to distract ourselves while we awaited our doom: Star Wars and computers, comics and Space Raiders.

The film provides some self-aware commentary on this self-willed apathy. Professor Falken, the scientist who built the nuclear AI, tells David that he quit the project because he couldn’t get his computer to understand the concept of ‘futility’. Noting that David is desperate to save the world, Falken gives him a lecture on the extinction of the dinosaurs: ‘There’s a time when you should give up.’ But David eventually succeeds where Falken failed, and he does so by playing a computer game; or rather, by getting the machine to play noughts and crosses against itself. Saving the world by sitting at home playing games was the kind of wish fulfilment young Gen X boys could get on board with. And the AI’s final judgement on the experience was a motto for all slackers, encapsulating what we felt about what Falken calls ‘the horror of survival’, the whole complicated business of having to be a successful adult in a nuclear world:

For a slightly more sobering ‘80s vision of nuclear war, there’s always the monumentally terrifying BBC TV film ‘Threads’:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

In 1973 Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) is put in a cryogenic deep freeze following a botched medical procedure. After a couple of centuries he’s awoken by renegade scientists who want a man with no history, someone whose anonymity will be crucial in bringing down the despotic Leader of their surveillance state. On the run from the authorities, Miles falls in with the vain and pampered poet Luna (Diane Keaton) and together they try to prevent the Leader being cloned from his last remaining organ: his nose.

Unusually for a comedy movie, the plot of Sleeper actually makes sense. It’s inspired by the H. G. Wells novel The Sleeper Awakes (1910), in which the man who has slept for centuries is the richest and best-known man in the world. The way Sleeper flips this premise, taking Miles’s nobody-ness and making it the central joke, is a genuinely neat touch. It also reflects a broader sci-fi literacy that enriches the film (sci-fi author Ben Bova was a science advisor). A lot of the sketches are spoofs of popular sci-fi tropes, including the use of Douglas Rain - the voice of HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - as a bossy computer. 

All this neatness and sci-fi erudition is a little superfluous, because the film is really just a sequence of period-specific sketches. There’s a whole sequence in which the scientists ask Miles to identify the subjects of a load of old photographs, enabling Woody Allen to do a series of jokes that might have been fab in the early ‘70s but are now utterly meaningless to anyone under the age of 65. 

Given that this is a piece about a Woody Allen film, and you know what’s coming, it’s worth noting a revealing little side note in this scene with the photographs. It ends when the scientists produce a copy of Playboy magazine and ask Miles to ‘explain’ it. During all of this we get a brief glimpse of the centrefold. It’s a real-life Playboy centrefold - a 1972 picture of model Lena Forsén naked, apart from her boots and hat - and one that has since become incredibly famous. This edition of Playboy was, with wearying inevitability, lying around the lab in the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute when the guys there were looking for a default test image for digital processing. They decided that a nude model (admittedly, a cropped image showing her neck and shoulders) would be just the ticket. The photo went on to be central to the development of internet images in general, and Forsén has been called ‘the First Lady of the Internet’. As an indication of the cultural milieu in which Sleeper (and the internet) was made, this is as good as anything else.

Delights

Some of the sketches are pure comic delight: not the ones that feature Allen’s trademark nervous banter, but the ones that go heavy on the slapstick. There’s a wonderful sequence with the skin of a giant mutant banana, and a bit where a groggy Miles eats a rubber glove and then proceeds to blow it up like bubblegum, which I first saw 40 years ago and remains one of my favourite jokes. Right at the end, when Luna is raving about the handsome, brilliant and brave rebel leader, Miles counters with ‘Yeah, but can he do this?’ followed by a ridiculous little dance. I have been basing my entire character on this ever since.

It’s also a really good-looking film, which, again, it really doesn’t have to be. The production design by Dale Hennesey (who also worked on more po-faced sci-fi including Logan’s Run (1976) and Fantastic Voyage (1966)) is terrific, all sterile sci-fi white wipe clean interiors like George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971). The costume design by Joel Schumacher is a lot better than his Batsuit-with-nipples of his Batman films. There’s some inventive use of mid-century brutalist settings and futuristic googie architecture. There’s even a beautifully-designed presentation about the cloning of the Leader’s nose, which features some delightful fonts. 

Discomforts

So, here we go. Woody Allen. A lot has been alleged and little has been proved, but whatever the truth or untruth of the serious allegations against Allen (which have never made it to court despite being investigated), they’ve ruined his relationship with the public at large because they key into things that have made us uncomfortable for decades. Marrying your partner’s daughter is just not good behaviour, and there’s always been something twisted about the portrayal of women and relationships in his films.

The romantic plot in Sleeper isn’t as unpleasant as that in Manhattan (1979), which features a 42-year-old Allen and a 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway; but it’s still pretty bad. Diane Keaton’s character Luna is a self-important idiot, but what’s notable is Miles’s absolutely relentless negging. He is a self-defined ‘funny’ man whose every joke is a put-down, whose every literary reference is an insistence on his own intellectual superiority, and who likes nothing better than simultaneously desiring and deriding a woman who’s a lot younger than he is. (Keaton is ten years younger than Allen; when Sleeper was made she was in her mid-twenties, Allen in his mid-thirties.) The relationship is that of a skeevy lecturer with a pretty student. Perhaps we just have to be grateful that Allen didn’t go into academia. 

Can we show the kids?

I first saw Sleeper at about 15 and I thought it was the best thing ever. I was a massive Woody Allen fan for about the next 10 years: I’ve even watched What’s Up Tiger Lily (1966) and Shadows and Fog (1991), which isn’t something many people can say. There was a time, back there, when Woody Allen’s way of being in culture, and consuming it, was deeply influential. 

There’s a running joke in his 1980 movie Stardust Memories in which people, including a group of alien visitors, keep telling his film director character that they prefer his ‘early, funny’ films. And Sleeper is one of the best of the early, funny films. If anyone’s going to enjoy it, it's probably the kids. Young men, most probably of all.

Is it as good as you remember?

Well, no, but it was one of my very favourite films for a while so it had a lot to live up to. 

My tastes have changed somewhat in the last forty years. It would be worrying if they hadn’t. Watching it now, I’m much more aware of where some of the good jokes were stolen from: the shaving sequence that’s very obviously a nod to the mirror gag in Duck Soup, the schtick with the ladder that could be Buster Keaton, the fight with the futuristic kitchen that could be Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle (1958). But it’s still funny. I largely stopped taking Woody Allen seriously when he started to take himself seriously and stopped trying to be so funny. Comedy is a serious business.

What leapt out to me in this rewatch was that intellectual snobbery that pervades the film. In Sleeper, when Luna wants to praise something, she says: ‘It’s pure Keane. No. No, it’s greater than Keane: it’s Cugat.’ This is a joke about the pitifully mainstream and middlebrow tastes of this anodyne society; she’s referencing the kitsch painter Margaret Keane and the easy-listening musician Xavier Cugat. Another way of describing Keane is that she was a talented woman exploited by a controlling man; another way of describing Cugat is that he was a huge force in Latin American music. 

And yes, to an extent this is unfair: the metropolitan elite of the early ‘70s would have found it easy to laugh at both of them purely on the basis of their art, which was - as a matter of objective fact - popular and mainstream. There is no serious evidence of racism or misogyny here. But this joke does reflect a certain lack of curiosity on Allen’s part: a cautious, self-protective preference for pre-approved cultural output, and a bullying disdain for everything else, anything not considered respectable by the holders of luxurious apartments in upper Manhattan.

The positive side of this was that his movies were on-ramp. For a start I definitely discovered trad jazz thanks to him, and beyond that, his intellectual snobbery made me aspire to know more, to learn about the things he was referencing. What’s Up Tiger Lily and Shadows and Fog aren’t very funny, but they inspired me to seek out ‘60s Japanese movies and Fritz Lang’s expressionist masterpiece M (1931). I’m pretty sure I’d seen Marx Brothers movies before I saw Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), in which Allen’s character is saved from suicide by seeing Duck Soup (1933); but I know I watched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) because of the closing sequence of Allen’s Love and Death (1975). 

If I got nothing else from Woody Allen’s films, at least I got a key lesson in being a metropolitan elitist intellectual snob.

For more sci-fi and comedy, try our piece on Doctor Who and the silly TV dads of the 1970s

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

Rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is assigned to the case of a prolific and professional group of bank robbers who disguise their identities with rubber masks of American presidents. Grizzled veteran Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey) is convinced the criminals are surfers, and Utah learns how to surf so he can infiltrate the gang. Utah loves the gang’s extreme sports lifestyle and falls under the sway(ze) of their charismatic leader Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), but in the end duty trumps bro-mance and Utah gets his man.

It does not come as a surprise to learn that by the time shooting started Point Break had been circulating in Hollywood for a while, and was originally going to be directed by Ridley Scott in the mid-’80s. It feels very much like a high-concept, goofy ‘80s action movie that has strayed into the ‘90s (pace Reeves’s other big break, Speed, in 1994). In 1992 - the year after Point Break was released - Reservoir Dogs came out, and American indie cinema exploded.

It’s noticeable how out of place Reeves seems in this role, a Gen Xer in the kind of movie that might have originally suited a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone. Busey - who had starred in prime Boomer Vietnam surfing drama Big Wednesday (1978) and in prime dumb ‘80s action movie Lethal Weapon (1987) - seems much more at home with this material, big and broad and busy.

Although the early ‘90s gave us our first sight of Keanu Reeves, action hero, he found his true calling right at the end of the decade in The Matrix (1999). Point Break was the end of the line for the high-concept, lowbrow ‘80s action flick; The Matrix was the start of something completely different. Its Hong-Kong-influenced, special-effects-enhanced trajectory points directly to today’s weightless MCU superhero action movies.

Discomforts

Although the script had been around for several years at this point - no doubt titivated and torn apart by each successive producer and star - director Kathryn Bigelow and her then-husband James Cameron decided that they needed to work on it too. You can certainly feel James Cameron’s heavy typing hand all over it; the man has an unerring sense for echt-Hollywood ‘80s popcorn dialogue, all stupidly quotable and quotably stupid. Try as you might to forget the introduction of Keanu Reeves’ character as ‘Young, dumb and full of cum’, you never will. It has the awful, undeniable draw of driving past a car crash, simultaneously memorable and regrettable.

Also, Lori Petty’s character Tyler, the woman who teaches Reeve’s Johnny to surf and inducts him into the beach bum lifestyle, starts out as a full-rounded character but by the end is reduced to little more than a plot token to be passed back and forth between the bros.

Delights

We’re hardly the first people to note that Kathryn Bigelow is quite good at film directing. Among all the surfing and skydiving and armed robbery there is a superlative bit of running as, right in the middle of the film, Reeves pursues Swayze, disguised in a Ronald Reagan mask, on foot through a series of suburban houses and back gardens. It is one of the great cinema chase scenes, up there with Friedkin’s car and elevated train chase from The French Connection (1971) or Peter Yates’s car chase in Bullitt (1968). With both of these it shares the legacy of practical film-making in which a sense of physical geography, clear sequence of action and a rhythm of montage are paramount. At every point in the chase we know precisely who’s where and what they’re doing. It also shows us both the closeness of Utah and Bodhi and the distance between them, both physically and morally. 

And it ends with Keanu firing his gun up into the air and going ‘Ahh!’.

Can we show the kids?

Well, the older kids, maybe - although the only real reason to do this would be to make sure they get some of the jokes in Edgar Wright’s far, far superior Hot Fuzz (2007) 

After all, the running fence-jumping joke that makes an appearance in all the Cornetto films (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End) is a direct reference to the foot chase sequence in Point Break.

Is it as good as you remember?

It’s as stupid as I remember.

Although what The Metropolitan remembers Point Break for is not the movie itself, but rather this cover of the ‘90s culture review magazine The Modern Review:

The Modern Review was a magazine of ‘low culture for high brows’ and a big influence on us starting The Metropolitan in the first place; it put a marker down for the Gen X insistence on taking stupid cultural artefacts entirely seriously, and not being wholly tongue in cheek about it.

In the piece in question Polly Frost writes about how Keanu Reeves appears to be a being purely of cinema: a physical beauty with no physical presence, an actor without artifice, existing solely to be looked at. This is also what Point Break is: an extruded product of the Hollywood entertainment system, to be viewed, rented, referenced and forgotten. It is not bland, but its flavours are artificial; it is entertaining but not enlightening; it is frequently disappointing but annoyingly memorable. It is precisely the kind of mass-produced mass entertainment that says more about its time and culture than any thoughtful work of art or piece of art school weirdness.

It captures perfectly the Bush-era twilight following the Reagan dawn, a moment when those high ‘80s, high camp Hollywood certainties were starting to look too brash and idiotic. Keanu is a stoned slacker surfing across the surface of a roaring, cocaine-‘80s action movie. A ‘point break’ is an incoming wave that breaks across an outcrop, far out to sea from the main beach; it creates the perfect circumstances for a long surf ride into the shore or, in this case, a long cultural ride on Gen X indie art.

1991 was the year that Nevermind came out and the punk underground went mainstream; it was the true beginnings of what Thomas Frank in The Baffler called ‘the commodification of dissent’. In the way Point Break co-opts extreme sports aesthetics into a conventional cop thriller, you can begin to glimpse the way that alternative culture would drive mass entertainment throughout the ‘90s.

Of course, this dynamic can feed back the other way. The other thing that Point Break calls to mind - for at least one Metropolitan editor - is the song ‘My Own Private Patrick Swayze’ by ‘90s band The Male Nurse . And has there ever been a better articulation of the joys of owning a two-foot high Patrick Swayze?

No, no there hasn’t.

For slightly less histrionic early ‘90s policing, how about a nice gentle cruise around Oxford in Inspector Morse’s Jag?

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

Petty criminal Fred (Christophe Lambert) attends the birthday party of Héléna Kerman (Isabelle Adjani), where he steals a folder of documents from her gangster husband. Pursued by the mob and les flics he flees into the Paris Metro, and discovers an underground world. He begins to blackmail Héléna as an excuse to get close to her, even as he whiles away his time putting together a band with all the gypsies, tramps and thieves he befriends in the subway.

Subway opens with a high speed car chase through the centre of Paris (Christophe Lambert is driving a dinky little Peugeot 205) set to a pounding rock score, until the tape Lambert is listening to gets chewed up by the car stereo. As an opening scene, it is, as it should be, a perfect introduction not only to the story but to the tone and approach of the movie.

Subway was a key film in the ‘80s cinéma du look trend of style over substance,  and although almost all of it takes place underground, it's almost all surface. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing going on. Like the nouvelle vague French films of the ‘60s, Subway seems to be taking the tropes of Hollywood pulp movies and passing them through a distinctly Gallic vision to create something entirely new. But where something like Godard’s 1960 À Bout de Souffle took film noir and reinvented it through a hand-held dive into the Parisian demi-monde, Subway has an altogether more ‘80s sensibility. It takes the deadbeat cool of late New Hollywood thrillers like Walter Hill’s 1978 Driver (also starring Isabelle Adjani) and shoots it like a cigarette commercial, but with a persistent European quirk.

The key image of the movie (the cover, indeed, of the soundtrack LP, which I still, regrettably, own), is Christophe Lambert, his hair a bleached blonde halo round his magnificently sullen face, dressed in a tux, coming out of a steam-filled corridor, carrying a portable neon light. It is an image of ridiculous, fantastical cool, which is immediately undercut by the fact that the floor then gives way beneath him and he drops his futurist lamp into a pool of sewage.

As with the opening car chase, Subway is constantly undercutting its extravagant cool as if to reassert an independent identity: the French can be cool, it insists, but not in the same way as the Americans. That sequence with the fluorescent light happens as Lambert’s Fred is beginning to explore his new home. He descends from the ‘70s tiles of the Metro, through the ‘50s brown and cream municipal paint of the administrative corridors, and down into the naked concrete and pipework of the deep service tunnels. It is there, beneath the acreted decoration of culture, that he finds a multi-ethnic, fraternal, egalitarian France; made free by its lack of purpose, made cool by its lack of effort, a revolt into style.

Can we show the kids?

Amazingly for a French film there’s no sex, no nudity and very little violence. On the other hand, it’s hard to know what a twenty-first century child might make of such a determinedly ‘80s artefact, and a French one at that.

Delights

As you would expect from a film obsessed with appearances above all, the casting is terrific. It’s not just the cinematic charisma of Christophe Lambert and Isabella Adjani, but the rumpled, world-weary Michele Galabru as the police inspector, the wary charm of Richard Bohringer and the ineffably French fizzog of Jean Reno as an inscrutably monosyllabic drummer.

It is also a delightful reminder of a European ‘80s that was defiantly distinct from the Hollywood ‘80s that has seared itself into our collective memories. This is the ‘80s of ZTT releases of obscure German electronica, Swatch watches and Fido Dido, and it's lovely to see it again.

Discomforts

But not so lovely to hear it. The French may be superb at symbolist classical music, cafe jazz and chanson, but they are terrible at pop. Or they were in the ‘80s (I have a considerable weakness for yé-yé). The music in Subway is terrible. Just terrible. I still don’t understand why I not only bought the soundtrack LP but played it to the extent that I am still word-perfect on the horrendous English language lyrics nearly forty years later.

The cast is almost entirely male. Apart from Adjani only three other women actors get speaking parts and two of them are at a bourgeois dinner party where Adjani’s character insults them all.

More seriously, while director Luc Besson has been cleared of raping a woman he had a relationship with, other women came forward with accusations of inappropriate behaviour during the investigation. Uncomfortably, he has claimed that his film Léon about a hitman (Jean Reno) who forms a relationship with a 12 year old girl (Natalie Portman) was inspired by his own relationship with his second wife, who was 16 when he married her (when he was 31).

Is it as good as you remember?

Well, no.

As evidenced by the fact that I own the soundtrack LP, I loved this film in 1985, but as also evidenced by the fact that I had to buy the soundtrack LP, this was 1985 and there was no way I was ever going to be able to watch the film again. Not until it came out on VHS. And even then, as a French language film, it was hard to find. All I had to remember it by were the indelible mise en scene. The images, the style, the cool. That, and Eric Serra’s execrable songs.

But that was the purpose of the cinéma du look; to move away from the cinéma vérité of the nouvelle vague, to create something more stylised and cinematic. Even if it said nothing, it said it with a style and verve that stuck in the mind and captured the imagination.

It still distinguished itself from the American equivalent, however. The two main transport cops may be called Batman and Robin but they are ineffectual,  chain-smoking idiots who can’t even get their walkie-talkies to work. In a Hollywood film, the nervous young roller-skating thief Fred befriends would be redeemed to play a minor heroic role, but here he remains a petty thief who preys on the weak and betrays his friends. All the characters remain off-kilter and equivocal, a weird parade of misfits and loners.

And perhaps this revolution in style succeeded. You could imagine a re-make of Subway - all low life eccentrics and small time crooks - by Tarantino. Although he’d write a better script and have much better music. It has its shadows and echoes in the work of American film-makers like Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers. And surely Wes Anderson is a proponent of the cinéma du look, par excellence?

Like many of these American indie films it feels like a quintessentially Gen X product - not made by us, perhaps, but made for us, for those media-literate, design-minded members of the quotation generation. A film that says nothing is a film that can be read into, a text purely for interpretation, a signifier with no significance. The perfect material, in fact, for a Substack newsletter devoted to taking apparently meaningless pulp culture entirely too seriously.

For more dorky French cool, try Jean-Michel Jarre:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

‘White suburban punk’ Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez) falls in with ‘repo’ man Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a debt collector whose job is finding and repossessing cars whose owners have defaulted. Bud is obsessed with repossessing a Chevy Malibu for a $20,000 reward; also after the Malibu are Bud’s arch enemies the Rodriguez Brothers, UFO nut Leila and an army of Men in Black. Because the Malibu’s owner, mad scientist J. Frank Parnell, has stashed something uncanny - possibly the radioactively decaying bodies of aliens - in the boot.

The first name you see in the opening credits of Repo Man is not that of the director Alex Cox, or the stars Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, but that of the producer Mike Nesmith; son of the inventor of Tippex, pioneer of music video television and, most importantly, Monkee.

It might seem like an odd combination - the sitcom bubblegum pop performer and the hardcore punk indie movie - but if Repo Man is reminiscent of anything, it's the Monkees movie Head (1968). A very ‘60s media hyperobject of parodies, cut ups and metanarrative mucking about, Head opens with the Monkees committing suicide before being torn limb from limb by screaming teenagers. And then it really gets going. As may be evident from this description, it does not take itself at all seriously.

Repo Man is the punk version of this tongue-in-cheek mash-up approach. It’s a collage of B-movie tropes, weirdo Americana and daft jokes, all soundtracked by hardcore LA punk band The Circle Jerks. The plot is nugatory and very silly, and the dialogue was apparently mostly improvised. What matters is the attitude and the mood, the vibe. And the vibe is very cool indeed: ramshackle, cheery, homemade. Punk.

Can we show the kids?

Why not? It’s still pretty good fun. Perhaps more pertinently, if you wanted to give them a more accurate idea of what 1984 was like than the one provided by the first season of Stranger Things, then this is the movie to play. Stranger Things is mostly inspired by early-’80s Hollywood kids’ films, while Repo Man satirises the great consumerist, mainstream machine of Reaganite culture. Even as technology and finance were enabling wild, fantastic blockbusters, they were also enabling anyone to pick up a camera and make a movie. Repo Man is as representative of the ‘80s as Ghostbusters.

Delights

Three big ones: Harry, Dean, Stanton. Stanton was already a character actor of repute, most notably in Alien (1979) and Wise Blood (1979), but it was Repo Man and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (also 1984) that made him indie royalty. (That he is the uncle of friend of this publication makes him Metropolitan royalty too).

However terrible the film, if Harry Dean Stanton is in it you’re guaranteed at least one interesting performance. In Repo Man, he is the film and it's worth watching just for him. As the tired, ornery, avuncular Bud, all self-opinionated monologues and unlikely advice, he is the central wheezing calliope around which the entire merry-go-round spins.

But it’s also worth watching for many other reasons, most of all that free-for-all punk affect. You can well believe that a deal of the dialogue was improvised, because you get the sense that everyone was fully involved, committed and enjoying themselves. It is not pleased with itself; it is just good company.

Despite its enjoyably lackadaisical approach to conventional plot and structure, it is a well crafted bit of film making. Not all the performances are professional, but they’re all interesting; there are no duff or predictable line readings. The images of the post-industrial forgotten outskirts of LA captured by Alex Cox and cinematographer Robby Müller are delightful and frequently beautiful, lyrical framings of sunset gradients and neon nights. And the ‘needledrop’ soundtrack of hardcore punk is splendid.

Is it as good as you remember?

Actually, you know what? Better. 

As Roger Ebert, the American movie critic, said in his review:

This is the kind of movie that baffles Hollywood, because it isn't made from any known formula and doesn't follow the rules… I saw Repo Man near the end of a busy stretch on the movie beat: three days during which I saw more relentlessly bad movies than during any comparable period in memory. Most of those bad movies were so cynically constructed out of formula ideas and commercial ingredients that watching them was an ordeal. Repo Man comes out of left field, has no big stars, didn't cost much, takes chances, dares to be unconventional, is funny, and works.

One of the running jokes of the movie is that all the stores are filled with generic products, white tins and bottles labelled things like ‘Beer’, ‘Drink’ and ‘Food’, like the Canadian chain Loblaw’s famous ‘No Brand’ packaging designs of the late ‘70s. The film evidently views conventional Hollywood movies as the same kind of generic product and sets out instead to make something individual and artisanal: a little bit wonky, a little bit weird, but full of character, craft and charm.

These generic products also refer to the film’s fascination with mundane Americana. The plot is full of leftover bits of B-movie esoterica, and the images are equally full of overlooked ephemera: car lots and convenience stores, pine tree car fresheners. A repo man is himself quintessentially American, a blue collar freelancer chasing other people’s debts. Bud - whose job only exists because car owners default on their loan payments - is obsessed with the idea of credit and debt, understanding it as the engine of American capitalism. 

These are not quintessential American heroes, and this is not the America of cinematic Hollywood. This is the America of actual Los Angeles: backlots and junkyards and suburbs, the weird and the wired and the tired. In all of this Repo Man pre-figures the American indie movie of the following two decades, from Jim Jarmusch’s outsider weirdos to Quentin Tarantino’s pop-culture-literate trash talk. 

Repo Man is a reminder that in the ‘80s there was still a significant divide between the mainstream culture and the underground. The underground gave and took in equal measure; it was eclectic in its inspiration, and gleeful and generous in its presentation. Alex Cox went on to present the peerless cult film show Moviedrome for the BBC in the ‘90s, where he introduced everything from D.O.A. (1950) to Cry-Baby (1990). It was where I first saw Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stardust Memories (1980) and Carnival of Souls (1962). It was a cinematic education for a generation, and Repo Man has the same spirit: it is serious about finding some alternative to the mainstream, and intent on having fun in the process. 

For more indie movies of the 80s:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

In late seventeenth century England, draughtsman Richard Neville enters a contract with a Mrs Herbert to draw twelve views of her house and garden in return for £8 and sexual favours. Objects mysteriously placed in the locations Neville is drawing - a slashed jacket, a ladder to an open window - begin to suggest to Neville that Mrs Herbert’s husband has come to a sticky end. When Mr Herbert is found drowned in his own moat, a plan to frame Neville for his murder becomes apparent.

A review of a film

“Picasso. I hate him. But you’re not allowed to. Ahhh, I hate him. But you can’t. Cubism… I fucking hate him. He’s rotten in the face cavity… I should be kinder. He did suffer a mental illness. Picasso suffered from the mental illness of [pause] misogyny … Smarter men than I am say he wasn’t a misogynist. They’re wrong. He said ‘Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, you destroy the past she represents.’ Cool guy. ‘The greatest artist of the twentieth century’.”

Hannah Gadsby, ‘Nanette’ (2017)

It’s difficult to come out as a person who ‘hates’ a piece of art. Not common-or-garden art - Duran Duran’s ‘A View to a Kill’, say, or Ken Follett novels; that’s fine. But Art-with-a-Capital-A: if you make a case for hating a piece of that, you risk marking yourself out as a Faragist or a Daily Mail reader or a ‘my five year old could have done that!’-er; an unsophisticate, a rube, a dullard. You’re open to the charge that you haven’t understood, that you’re taking it all too literally.

My mother, who had a mind like a razorblade and taught me about feminism, loved The Draughtsman’s Contract. She loved allusion and intellectual puzzles; she taught English literature; she was a fan of Blake and Donne, and an avid participant in word games. After watching The Draughtsman’s Contract she mulled it over and then announced she’d worked it out; she’d cracked the code. (She never told me what the answer was. This is one of the problems with dead people; you can’t ring them up and resume conversations when you suddenly develop an interest years later.) She loved poetry, whereas I can’t bear it. I like it when people say what they mean. My mother usually did. So here goes.

I hate A Draughtsman’s Contract because it exhibits a deep, violent and totally unconscious misogyny. I don’t give a shit about the puzzle and I don’t give a shit about the artistry. Let’s spell this out, because - astonishingly - I haven’t read a single piece about The Draughtsman’s Contract that mentions it: the sexual servicing demanded by Neville’s contract is rape. Throughout the film Neville rapes Mrs Herbert repeatedly, and (from the viewer’s perspective) explicitly. 

This is not framed within an understanding of Neville as a violent, manipulative man who loathes women. It’s a minor character note; he’s horny, not hateful. The film - and every single critic who describes it as ‘erotic’ - finds the rape morally equivalent to Mrs Herbert’s scheming: the yin to its yang, the Sooty to its Sweep.

This is not a film about violence. When murders occur the camera shies politely away. The rape makes no sense as a plot device either, introducing a series of bewildered questions in the viewer’s mind (why did Mrs Neville agree to this term in the contract? If the plot is about procuring an heir, why is he raping the post-menopausal woman while having consensual sex with the fertile one? Why is everyone standing around allowing all the raping to happen?) 

I hate to be anachronistic, but this is fucking unacceptable. If you’re minded to defend it, ask yourself why Mrs Herbert has to be shown vomiting and crying, pleading and broken, when the plot-neutral and genuinely erotic alternative of enthusiastic participation was available. 

It’s true that our understanding of coercion and consent has changed dramatically in the past 40 years. In the early ‘80s the idea of sexy women being forced to have sexy sex because of some hellishly over-engineered plot device was as common as Carry On; there was an expansive appetite for watching women have unwanted sex. Even as late as 1993 a torrent of top Hollywood talent appeared in Indecent Proposal, which had a similar premise to The Draughtsman's Contract (and I bet Greenaway hates it when you point that out which is why I’m including it here because good god Peter Greenaway can fuck off). Sexual coercion was a thrilling game, and men in England and Wales were legally entitled to rape their wives until 1991. 

But this - the different times, the different morals - is no excuse here, because Mrs Herbert’s distress is lovingly emphasised and the entire narrative motor of the film drives us towards the conclusion that Mrs Herbert’s distress and unhappiness are just deserts for her selfish machinations. She’s all the things the draughtsman (and Peter Greenaway when he made the film) are not: she’s old, she’s powerful, she’s English ruling-class. She is manipulative, intent on advancement, and mean to the family retainer who is in love with her. She is, quite literally, asking for it; she agreed to it, in writing, she signed her name, the clue is in the title. 

Mr Herbert has to be shown vomiting and pleading to be released from the contract because she is being punished in a way we are invited to see as righteous. Above all else she is being punished for remorselessly pursuing her own interests, the one thing women must never do. This is relentless, lingering, sadistic anticipatory corrective rape. (In a crowded field of enraging creative decisions, the lingering is the worst.)

I hate The Draughtsman’s Contract. I hate it, and you can’t make me like it. But what I hate even more is how many recent reviews on modish cultural websites enthusiastically accept the ‘erotic’ reading. Whatever has changed in our understanding of rape and consent, the new generation of critics - plenty of them female, and most of them identifying as ‘feminist’, just as my mother did - still think old, powerful, rich bitches deserve the kind of punishment that only a real man can deliver. 

“When I began my career 20 years ago, my favourite comedian was Bill Cosby. It’s healthy to re-assess, isn’t it?’ 

Hannah Gadsby, ‘Nanette’ (2017)

A review of an art film

A work of art is a contract between the artist and the audience. Unlike the contract of the title, viewers are active participants in the contract, free to reinterpret its terms and renege on it as they wish.

At one point Richard Neville, the Draughtsman, becomes obsessed with a painting he finds in the house, trying to puzzle out its meanings as he casually rapes Mrs Herbert. The painting is Januarius Zick’s Allegory of Newton's Theory of Optics, thick with contemporary allusions and esoteric symbolism entirely opaque to a modern observer. It presents a puzzle - like the film, we are given to understand - and one to which the intended solution can only be unsatisfying, as its significance and relevance became hopelessly obscure long ago.

But the contract between the audience and the art endures: it does not recede in the same way the symbolism does. The audience makes the art as much as the artist. There can be no anachronism in our response. Our understanding of the art is moulded as much by our own context as the artists’ intention is by theirs.

Indeed, one of the key themes of the film is that the artist does not fully know what he does. Neville insists he is only drawing what he sees: “I try very hard never to distort or to dissemble”. But in fact he deliberately shapes what is before him to match what he wants to draw, clearing the gardens of people and herding sheep into place. And even when he has all as he thinks it should be, he does not see what he sees, the clues that are set out in the landscape for him to depict. Stubbornly gullible, he does not perceive the reality that surrounds him.

And if the film might be, as Greenaway suggests, better called A Filmmaker’s Contract, then we might assume it shows us what he did not intend, just as Neville draws a murder he cannot see.

One reading of the film, for example, is that it is intended to be a critique of male creativity, presented here as intrusive and controlling. Much is made of the gardens, which the aristocratic men lavish with attention at the expense of their wives. Nature is set in order. Exotic fruits are uprooted from the colonies and grown under glass in rainy England. Neville rails against the Garden of Eden, Paradise, for not having orderly manmade pathways. In this reading, his demand for sex is acknowledged as rape and is shown as being the price of - and a of a piece with - his art: it is a deliberately violent and unpleasant metaphor.

If you incline to this reading though, you have to also acknowledge its parallel reflection: that the creativity of women is purely ‘natural’. Which is to say, unthinking, unskilled, unintentional. Young Mrs Talmann’s playing at the spinet is dismissed as being like birdsong - in other words, it is instinctive rather than crafted - and then dismissed as possibly not having happened at all. Men represent active control, so women must represent passive fecundity. Where women have agency, it lies in scheming for the making and taking of life. Just as Neville’s drawings contain the clues to an unseen villainy, so the film contains the clues to the background cultural misogyny of the ‘80s.

And the film is very ‘80s. Its period setting makes it look terribly New Romantic, like an Adam Ant video is being filmed just out of frame. Michael Nyman does an amazing job of finding the Purcell in Kraftwerk and turning it back into triumphant, pulsing parping, like The Penguin Cafe Orchestra playing a Prom. It's so arch, it’s practically a viaduct, one those bits of echt Roman architecture with which the formal gardens are decorated.

About this point in the decade people suddenly started to use the word ‘pretentious’ a lot more. It was meant as an insult, a way to curb flagrant intellectualism or aberrant good taste. A Draughtsman’s Contract is very pretentious. The original three hour edit was cut down to around 100 minutes and that missing hour or so must have contained most of the comprehensible plot. The film becomes an enigma in a garden, just like Zick’s Allegory.

Take the naked man dressed as bits of scenery who keeps hopping into the corners of frames and adopting statuesque poses, like a bucolic Bez. He’s never explained, rarely alluded to and his role isn’t clear. Is he a metaphor for how the upper classes of the period treated their workers like bits of scenery? Is he the masculine spirit of the gardens? A fool? A figment of the audience’s imagination? Pfft. Explaining him would be to unfairly trammel the audience; it would be nannyish hand-holding.

The trouble is that the film retains bits of plot, like the clothes strewn about Neville’s landscapes. But they have no more in them than those clothes. Indeed, the clothes are the discarded remnants of plot, the clues to the suggested murder of Mr Herbert. A detective story with no detective and no story is an irritating thing. It’s also, as art, a delightful idea, Pretentiousness is not necessarily bad. The word was everywhere because the early ‘80s was very pretentious indeed, thank goodness.

The film is full of Germans and Frenchmen pouring scorn on Richard Neville in particular, and British art in general, as an  inherently ridiculous idea. The British don’t do art: they do bad food and good sitcoms. A Draughtsman’s Contract is determined to give the lie to this assertion, to produce a British art film unlike anything anyone else was doing. The elliptical scenario, the frames within frames, formal gardens and formal poses, the ticking, minimalist music and the frothing, maximalist clothing: a thing uniquely of its place and time.

They don’t make art films like this anymore. British films are now mostly cargo cult gangster movies and low stakes whimsical larks with Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton. The development of the summer blockbuster and the  mainstreaming of ‘indie’ movies under Miramax and Harvey Weinstein has narrowed the opportunities for art cinema. Ironically, it was killed off by film-makers who behaved as Richard Neville does: controlling, bereft of imagination, casually and hideously abusive of those around him. 

For more ‘80s arthouse cinema:

The Metropolitan

Wings of Desire revisited

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is fore-armed. Can we show the kids? Wings of Desire…

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4 years ago · 3 likes · The Editors

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary called ‘The Blair Witch Project’.

A year later their footage was found.”

So runs the text on-screen at the beginning of the movie, the rest of the film “being” an assemblage of their film and video recordings as they - Heather, Mike and Josh - stumble around a featureless forest while something hunts them, torments them, pulls them deeper into the shadowy trees.

The Blair Witch Project is very much of its time; within the world of the film the characters rehearse the ‘90s preoccupation with media saturation. They refer to other films constantly, at one point deciding which way to go by recalling which witch was evil in The Wizard of Oz. Every frame of the movie is ‘filmed’ by the characters themselves - a practice they rationalise as ‘documentary making’ - illustrating the contemporary obsession with recording and the distancing effect of mediation. “It’s totally like filtered reality,” says cameraman Josh of the camcorder, “it's like you can pretend everything is not quite the way it is.” (At this risk of being a bit Media Studies, even ‘like’, that ubiquitous tic of ‘90s vernacular, is an unconscious reference to the distance between appearance and reality.)

And then we have the palaver around the movie. These were the early days of the Internet and the promotion of the film played with it beautifully, creating websites that hinted at the reality of world within the fiction. Fantastical as it now seems, there was some genuine confusion about whether Blair Witch was actually found footage, and this uncertainty propelled virality, in the modern sense, at a time when such a thing was new, difficult and almost unheard of. 

This was ‘multimedia’ in a world that wasn’t yet fully networked and saturated by it, a film centred on surveillance in a world that wasn’t yet wholly, literally recorded. With a plot hinging on consumer electronics that became obsolete almost immediately, it could only work at this particular moment in technological development: a liminal state between online ubiquity and offline confusion, real and ‘fake’, documentary and fiction: lost in the woods, sobbing into a camera.

Can we show it to the kids?

Well, the kids we showed it to thought it was fine and well-made, although not actually scary. They were more immediately struck by how a present-day remake would have more angles, more visual variety and better video compression. They were impressed by the verisimilitude of the shaky camerawork, and then pointed out that image stabilisation has improved immeasurably since then.

Discomforts

Heather gets a rough deal from whatever is in the woods, and from her crew. You may be tempted to think she gets a rough deal from the script, but her unwinding - the stripping away of her uptight, domineering film director persona as she loses control of her project, her life and her snot - is the main ratchet of the growing horror. Perhaps there is some deliberate commentary here about disembodied urges to punish ‘bossy’, ungovernable young women.

The ‘shaky-cam’, which quickly became a whole genre in itself, is still disorientating and, frankly, motion-sickness inducing. It is hard to believe that Josh, who fancies himself as a cinematographer, would not have bothered to hire a tripod for his 16mm camera. This was the ‘90s: long, still, locked-off shots were de rigueur in indie cinema.

Delights

Heather Donahue’s performance is great - in fact all the performances are terrific, with Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams all thoroughly naturalistic and believable. Never once do you question the characters’ decisions or motivations, so thoroughly have they drawn their personalities.

For all the queasiness it might cause, that whirling, lo-fi camcorder is a masterstroke of film-making. It's not a thing that could convincingly be pulled off again - there’s a reason why film language is so well established and why this technique is generally avoided - but it is perfect for a horror film. The blurry shadows contain horrors that a well-lit scene could never convey, no matter how good the special effects. The human imagination is a wonderful piece of equipment for scaring ourselves witless.

Quotes

Mike: What's your favourite thing to do on a Sunday?
Heather:  Um, it used to be, drive to the woods and go hiking.

Heather: I am so sorry.  It was never my intention to hurt anyone and I hope that's clear. I am so scared.  What was that?  I'm scared to close my eyes and I'm scared to open them.  I'm going to die out here. 

Is it as good as you remember?

One of the Metropolitan editors has strong memories of watching this in the cinema at the time of release and found it nearly as terrifying the second time around. One of the other editors is such a scaredy cat that he hadn’t ever dared watch it before, and while he wasn’t quite as scared as he had worried he might be (proving, as claimed above, that imagination is the most horrible experience of all), it is still a terrific example of its genre. 

That genre being, effectively, folk horror. This is the story of a group of metropolitan smart-alecks who underestimate the dark power of the woods and what dwells there. But it manages to tell this without the snooty superciliousness and conservative repression that dominates the traditional folk horror of the ‘70s.

The wild is the source of horror, but the characters are also uneasy with modernity. Heather’s insistence that “it's very hard to get lost in America these days” is a source of disappointment as much as hope. They have come looking for something beyond the city borders, something that happens outside of their urban lives. They fret and kvetch about mod-cons while utterly relying on them: compasses, cars, torches, snack bars. They look for proof of the supernatural, and are sorry when they find it.

The wild haunts them. The characters reference the film Deliverance; Mike, particularly, is convinced early on that rural locals are messing with them. But the film leaves this hanging; there is no explanation. Is someone making strange twig-dollies and practising al fresco dentistry in the woods, or something? We’ll never know.

There is the promise of a Lovecraftian reading, of a backwoods cult worshipping and summoning a nebulous force in the deep forest; but there is more of the M. R. James sort of horror, of something being disturbed, something that is only ever glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, in the whip pan of a camera, in the pixelated grain of lo-fi video.

The strange symbols and unfathomable customs of whatever is tracking them through the woods hint at a far older horror, a horror that goes back to the very beginnings of civilization, before homo sapiens was alone in the world. In the beginning, we were not the only humans; the woods were full of other people, other species of human like the Denisovans or Neanderthals, who made strange decorations of branches and flowers. People who lived differently, spoke differently, thought differently, who were unknowable and unnerving.

This is the horror that humans, safe behind their city walls, have carried with them through the millennia: that we may not be alone. If we go down to the woods today, we might not return.

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For more on unexpected ‘90s indie movie hits, try our rewatch of The Usual Suspects:

The Metropolitan

The Usual Suspects revisited

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is fore-armed. Can we show the kids? The Usual Suspects…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · The Editors

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

One seedy hotel, one hot and endless night, one Chekhovian gunshot: Mystery Train portrays three experiences of a single evening in Memphis. It’s all bound together by criss-crossing stories, Tom Waits playing Elvis records on the radio, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in a beautiful red suit.

The stories that make up this anthology movie are - as anyone who’s seen a Jarmusch film might expect - largely small. Stories in which nothing, and everything, happens; stories that are intimate, open-ended and frequently silly in an offbeat kind of way.

Mitsuko and Jun are two Japanese rockabilly teenagers searching the States for rock n’roll; Luisa is an Italian widow come to fetch her husband’s body home from the US; and Johnny is an English punk who has just been laid off from his factory job. These foreigners all end up at the same dilapidated backstreet hotel where they proceed to talk, drink and meet the ghost of Elvis.

Jim Jarmusch is too old to actually be Generation X, but his films of the ‘80s and ‘90s were perfect for a certain kind of young Gen Xer. They are full of people doing nothing and trying, unsuccessfully, to be cool.

Can we show the kids?

Yes, but only some of them will really like it. Young people of a particular type will always love the films of Jim Jarmusch, because his films very much take the point of view of young people of a particular type. His movies look at the adult world as if seeing it for the first time, like tourists in the world of adulthood, astounded by the small differences; every mundane detail is unexpected and new, worth examining and thinking about. Mystery Train carries this idea to completion by featuring teenagers who are also tourists, and who are therefore pretty much the perfect Jarmusch characters. And audience members.

Discomforts

Sex: Some uncomfortable sexual threat when Nicoletta Braschi is trailed by creep supreme Tom Noonan.

Bechdel test: Fail. Women talk to each other (well, Elizabeth Bracco talks, Nicoletta Braschi listens), but mostly about Joe Strummer and Elvis.

Violence: A couple of people get shot. First a racist, fatally; then Steve Buscemi, comedically.

Racism: See above. The overt racist gets his comeuppance pretty emphatically, though.

Delights

The look: This a beautiful film (which is not unexpected with the brilliant cinematographer Robbie Müller behind the camera). The nighttime scenes in particular are full of vibrant neon and close heat.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Quotable bits:

“You sleep too much. You spend half your life in your dreams.”
“Yeah, But sleep is wonderful. And when you're dead, you don't get to sleep ever again. Which means no more dreams.”

“To be 18 feels cool.”

Heartening afterlife of the stars: We usually call this bit ‘Disappointing afterlife of the stars’, but following 9/11, Steve Buscemi - an ex-firefighter -  volunteered at his old firehouse, working a week of twelve hour shifts sifting through rubble to find bodies.

Is it as good as you remember?

Mystery Train is a reminder not just of what it’s like to be 18 and to desperately want to feel cool, but also what it was like to be 18 in that moment, in the late ‘80s. Jarmusch’s thrift store aesthetic, beatnik affect and ‘50s decor perfectly fits the pre-grunge Gen X approach to style, raiding charity shops for ‘60s cast-offs and bin diving for all the records the Boomers thought were too old fashioned.

But this isn’t only a look. His backstreet settings, rundown diners and seedy hotels are not just ironic set dressing; he values them. This is captured perfectly by the scene in Sun Studios. Jun and Mitsuko, the rockabilly tourists who have come to Memphis to discover rock n’ roll history, are hustled through a perfunctory tour of Sam Philip’s shabby little studio by a tour guide rattling through her schtick in a patter impenetrable to the Japanese teenagers.

The scene is played for laughs, but the smallness and anticlimax matters. In the ‘50s the studio was so inconsequential that they sold recording time to anyone who walked in off the street, including, one afternoon in 1953, a country kid named Elvis Presley who wanted to record a song as a present for his mother. Unbelievable and glorious things happen as much in shabby and inconsequential places as they do in great ones.

Because these places seem unimportant we pass them by, oblivious and incurious, and miss the hidden glory. And even if we do know what they might once have been, custom makes them quotidian; we forget their significance or become numb to it, reducing them to just another item on a list of must-sees for tourists. It takes an outsider - like the the Japanese teenagers, like cultural outsider Jarmusch - to see them for what they are.

Jarmusch is fascinated by this promise of the extraordinary within the ordinary. Life and death (and the injuring of Steve Buscemi) happen in seedy hotel rooms, and over coffee and cigarettes in a rundown diner you might hear the story of a life.

This is another way in which he is a perfect Gen X director: he is a snapper up of unconsidered trifles. He examines the overlooked ordinary for the clues it might contain to the big questions: life, history, ‘us’. He embodies the sort of attitude that might lead you to write newsletter essays about the weird byways of Gen X culture. For instance.

It’s not only the places; it’s also - mostly, really - the people. Most of Jarmusch’s characters are bumbling idiots, but then most humans are bumbling idiots. Where the Coens tend to treat their idiots as stooges, and Wes Anderson treats his idiots as props, Jarmusch sees them as humans and is fascinated by the small importances and important smallnesses of their lives.

This also means that his films age well. Everyone is treated with equal dignity by Jarmusch films, if not by the universe, and so his work remains fundamentally life-affirming.

Which - in the ceaseless, unavoidable turmoil of the twenty-first century - is something of a relief.

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For more late 80s indie movies, why not revisit Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire?

The Metropolitan

The Metropolitan #13: Wing of Desire revisited

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is fore-armed. Can we show the kids? Wings of Desire…

Read more

4 years ago · 3 likes · The Editors

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch 

Peter Gibbons is so depressed by his pointless beige job in a pointless beige office that he sees a hypnotist, who keels over from a heart attack halfway through putting him under. The suddenly relaxed Peter finds himself with a new girlfriend, a new promotion and new plan for wreaking his revenge on his pointless beige boss. And then there’s Milton the muttering office misfit, who might just burn the building down if someone takes his stapler.

Office Space is very ’90s indeed. It’s set in 1999, in a tech firm preparing for Y2K (it even features an actual explanation of the Millennium Bug). This isn’t a post-industrial urban loft full of kombucha-fueled hustling start-up types; it’s an anonymous business park in an anonymous suburb where the management are more concerned about the cover pages on the TPS reports than they are about their burn-rate.

Can we show the kids?

If you ever need to explain what happened to Generation X when it (finally) went to work, this is a good place to start. Office Space shows a world in which even computer engineers don’t have mobile phones, people watch terrestrial TV, theme restaurants are enough of a novelty to be a joke, and cattle pen cubicles are hate-objects because we didn’t know how awful open-space offices would turn out to be without them. A time when a secure job was a dreary curse, not a ridiculous pipe dream.

When Peter’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend takes him to see soon-to-be-ex-hypnotherapist Mike McShane, the first thing he asks him to do is to hypnotise him so that he can forget about work entirely. He wants to go to the office and do his job, just not remember it. This is the entire set-up of Apple’s present-day hit show Severance, in which characters have brain surgery that divides their work and life experiences between entirely separate selves. A goofy Generation X joke has become a millennial nightmare.

Discomforts

The discomforts of Office Space are quintessentially ’90s. It has only one major female character; pretty much every other speaking role is played by a male actor. It has only one major character of colour; pretty much every other actor is white. In fairness, both of those characters end up being quite well developed while most of the white men surrounding them are depicted as being unremittingly awful.

Stephen Root’s Milton is a comic masterpiece, though the visual emphasis on his poor personal hygiene now feels like a gratuitously basic smear of non-neurotypical behaviours.

Delights

So, here’s the question. Why didn’t Ron Livingstone become a bigger star after Office Space and Band of Brothers? He’s all easy charm, with a pleasing, big wonky face, a lopsided grin and expressive eyebrows. He’s absolutely terrific in this. But pretty much everyone is terrific in this. At first it feels like Jennifer Aniston’s character is going to be a one-note manic-pixie dreamgirl, but they know they have a brilliant comic actor on their hands and give her much more to do. Gary Cole is perfectly appalling as Peter’s awful boss Lundberg, and, let’s say it again, Stephen Root’s Milton is hilarious.

And there’s that scene. As a present to his friends, Peter steals the recalcitrant office printer and takes it out to a field with them and a baseball bat. The resulting destruction is a wish-fulfilment dream for anyone who’s ever had to deal with a paper jam.

Quotes

“Looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays”

“I could burn the building down”

“The ratio of people to cake is too big”

Is it as good as you remember?

Office Space is indeed very ’90s. Appropriately enough for the quotation generation, a major plot point is ripped from another movie: Peter and his friends are not only stealing money from their employer, they’re stealing Richard Pryor’s scam from Superman III. (The characters comment on this repeatedly, pleased to have got the reference.) And they’re doing it by transferring a virus on a 3.5” disk. Because no one, but no one, mentions the internet. What bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Peter Gibbons is the quintessential slacker, whiling away his twenties in a dead-end job with no guiding ambitions or hopes. His great psychological breakthrough comes when he is able to not care that he’s failing. His escape at the end of the film lies not in wealth or success but in physical labour, working on a building site, a job he can easily not care about; something that he can cheerfully leave behind at the end of the day with his sanity - and soul - intact. (Everyone is very envious of one character who experiences life-changing injuries in an accident: insurance payout and he never has to work again, the lucky guy). Gibbons is, in many ways, the poster child for Generation X.

For those of us who also spent our twenties trapped in grey felt cubicles with self-appointed office clowns, typing gnomic numbers into phosphor-screen forms, Office Space is a perfect encapsulation not just of office life, but of the whole pointless, beige experience.

At the end of the film, nothing has changed. I mean, yes, Peter is working on a building site and Milton has made good on his promise of burning down the office, but no one has escaped (except Milton); everyone else is back in virtually identical pointless jobs, in virtually identical pointless business parks. 

The point, it appears, is that late-twentieth century life is pointless and beige and there’s nothing you can do to make it consequential or colourful. Even self-expression is regulated; the number of ‘flair’ badges Jennifer Aniston’s character has to wear on her waitress uniform is carefully monitored to make sure she is being herself to an appropriate level. All we can hope for, apparently, is to stay under the radar, out of the notice of management consultants, and try not to care. At the time, this seemed darkly funny; looking back from a gig-economy, social-media-soaked twenty-first century, it seems positively idyllic.

And it’s still very funny.

More from The Metropolitan on the perils and pains of first jobs in the 1990s:

The Metropolitan

The Metropolitan #16: Up in smoke

“I truly feel pity for you both. You are grown up now! And yet you still act as children, who want to do nothing but run and play. You cannot run and play all your life, Dianne!” Drugstore Cowboy (1989) 1992 was a bad time to graduate from university. I was lucky to have gone at all, of course; just 19% of…

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4 years ago · 7 likes · Rowan Davies

Next week: We swap universes, identities and decades with Doctor Who

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch: 

Little Tommy Cruise - as inhuman and smooth as any fighter jet - is arrogant trainee pilot Maverick, who has to battle his demons, his bête noir co-trainee Iceman, some Russian MiGs and his burgeoning hard-on for Kelly McGillis, all while upside-down at Mach 4.

Whichever US Navy comms person made the decision to collaborate closely with the makers of Top Gun must have been absolutely delighted with the result: a blockbustingly popular feature-length recruitment ad, slavering over impossibly expensive equipment and the upstanding values of US military personnel, beautifully rendered in creamy shades of burnt orange, peach and caramel. Released as the Cold War was coming to an end, it’s a piece of balls-to-the-wall Reagan-era braggadocio; walking sensitivity-barometer Matthew Modine turned down Cruise’s role because of the script’s celebration of militarism. There’s an interesting double bill to be had if you watch it alongside The Right Stuff, set in a similar environment but based on real stories, and with a greater journalistic sense of the sacrifice and horror attendant on pushing military jets to their limits.

Discomforts

Bechdel Test Fail. Nobody in the entire film has a conversation about anybody or anything other than Maverick.

Terrible soundtrack Kenny Loggins’ ‘Danger Zone’ is upsettingly literal. Harold Faltermeyer (there’s a name we’d all forgotten) gives more value with his Euro-synth backing to the flight scenes. Berlin’s woozy hit ‘Take My Breath Away’ sold millions, but Maverick and Goose singing ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ was the real musical takeaway, prompting a revival in Righteous Brothers sales and a million sketch show rip-offs.

Violence Mostly dodged, because these are almost all training exercises. A live-fire dogfight at the end has some Russian jets exploding in fireballs.

Disappointing afterlife of the stars Cruise is Cruise, you’ll already know what you think about that. On an unrelated point, we can’t afford lawyers.

Racism The Black cast members who have speaking roles can be counted on the fingers of one finger (it’s a good finger though; Clarence Gilyard, who was given a lot more to do as the excitable nerd terrorist in Die Hard).

Delights

Sex Kelly McGillis was presumably a big enough star to insist on a no-nudity clause, because the one sex scene is extremely (and thankfully) prim.

Homophobia Oddly, for a film set in a military all-male environment, nobody casts any slurs anywhere. There is deeply homoerotic volleyball scene in which Cruise and some of his co-stars are shown fisting and pumping in slow, oiled, topless motion. If you like that sort of thing. 

ER cast pre-union Anthony Edwards (who went on to play Dr Greene) adds value as Goose, a warm and characterful foil to Maverick’s pumped-up egotism; the few scenes he has with Meg Ryan as his perky wife are genuinely involving. Rick Rossovich (Carol Hathaway’s fiance for a few episodes) is boring as Iceman’s bully-boy sidekick Slider. He was kinda boring in ER too, come to think of it.

Quotable bits: ‘Goose, you big stud, take me to bed or lose me forever.’ ‘I feel the need… the need… for SPEED!’ ‘Your ego is writing cheques your body can’t cash’

Can we show it to the kids?

This question was handily answered by a piece in the Times last weekend, in which a Millennial journalist recounted all the ways Top Gun is deeply sexist and celebrates a version of machismo that many whippersnappers will find hilarious or alienating. There’s nothing truly shocking (or frightening) to worry about, though. 

Is it still worth it? 

Yeah, why not. Its function as propaganda means the script cannot create any real tension. Nobody (other than the Russians, who are mostly off-stage) is allowed to be truly corrupt or nasty or dangerous, so all the plot points detumesce on contact: Iceman is a good guy underneath, and the strand about the possibly scandalous death of Maverick’s father is built up relentlessly before being gently patted down in an extremely cursory way. But Cruise is perfectly cast as a self-satisfied hotshot, and the emotional aspects actually work pretty well, largely because McGillis, Edwards and Ryan bring their best game.

This movie marked the zenith of a period in which British ad directors were whisked off to Hollywood to make blockbusters. Tony Scott was drafted in to direct after the producers saw a European TV advertisement he had directed for Saab cars, and Top Gun is further evidence that he definitely knows how to sell a proposition while making things look absolutely lovely. His older brother Ridley trod the same path to make two of the most significant and lasting contributions to science fiction in Alien and Blade Runner. Top Gun has none of their deep intelligence and vision; it’s all aerodynamic surface, speeding forwards and engineered to within an inch of its life. 

But, like the jets, it also has a honed beauty and impelling forward motion. Scott doesn’t only know how to sell things; he also knows how to tell a story. The irresistibly beautiful title sequence explains a lot about the film’s appeal, and the opening scene - a training dogfight that goes wrong - is a masterfully tense piece of showing rather than telling. If you find yourself reaching for the ‘off’ button after that, your brow is definitely higher than ours.

Speaking of Ridley Scott:

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

Arnold Schwarzenegger is The Terminator, a killing machine from a future in which artificial intelligence has identified mankind as the enemy and has set about terminating humans enthusiastically and efficiently. The Terminator has been sent back in time to kill Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton) because she will become the mother of the leader of the human resistance, who in turn has sent back his right hand man, Michael Biehn, to protect her. They fall in love and Biehn becomes his best friend’s father before sacrificing himself to save Sarah.

Look, it sounds complicated, but The Terminator is mostly high violence and low quippery. It pretty much made Cameron's and Schwarzenegger's careers, so we have this to thank for Titanic and Arnie’s real-life impassioned speeches to Russian soldiers. 

The early ‘70s specialised in depressing visions of the future. In Silent Running the last forests on Earth were blasted off into space; in Soylent Green humans were boiled down into food. Even George Lucas, in THX1138, had a monochrome vision of an inhuman society, before remembering how much he had enjoyed Flash Gordon as a kid and coming up with Star Wars, returning science fiction to its pulp-inflected roots with derring-do and exciting explosions.

1984’s The Terminator marries these impulses - the apocalyptic future and the thrilling adventure - and adds the urban grittiness of ‘70s movies like The Warriors to produce something quite new: high concept sci-fi as low-brow action movie. In many ways it’s the great-grandfather of modern superhero blockbusters, but with cigarettes.

Discomforts

Consensual sex: Obligatory ‘80s soft core sex following obligatory ‘80s perfunctory 'romance'. Sarah Conner's room-mate has a sex scene but manages to keep both her top and her Walkman on throughout.

Gratuitous nudity: The naked bums of Schwarzenegger and Biehn, followed later by the breasts of Hamilton. The bums are arguably intrinsic to the story, the breasts are not.

Violence: Constant, crimson and cartoonish. A *lot* of guns but also some squelchy organ removal.

Bechdel test: A pass, in that Conner talks to her co-worker about something that isn't a man. However they’re talking about the murder, by a robot, of another woman, so it’s a pass in the same way that an E is better than a U.

Stereotyped minor BAME character: Paul Winfield is on-point as a world-weary, chain smoking detective, who is definitely too old for this shit, and much too Black to make it to the last reel.

Disappointing afterlife of the stars: Does being a philandering Republican governor of California count? Or, indeed, director James Cameron making both Titanic and the stupendously dimwitted Avatar?

Delights

Female character: Sarah Conner is, with Ellen Ripley, one of the foundational Strong Female Characters of the Hollywood action film, and Linda Hamilton’s transformation from cowering victim to determined and resourceful protagonist is a tremendous piece of work.

Character actors: Lance Hendrickson, who apparently played the Terminator for Cameron when he was pitching the script to studios, is rewarded with another cop role. Bill Paxton gets to be a stereotypical ‘80s movie punk and has his heart ripped out by Arnold.1

Quotable bits: "Come with me if you want to live." "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!" And - altogether now - "I'll be back."

Special effects: Stan Winston ahoy! Absolutely spectacular physical effects throughout, all stop-motion robots and rubbery masks; the peak of the craft.

Can we show it to the kids?

It’s full of the sort of gritty, squelchy violence you don’t get outside of horror movies these days; the politics are debatable and ‘of its time’; and those special effects are in danger of looking a bit silly for an audience raised on good quality CGI. But if you have a teenager with an indulgent attitude to mild horror, excessive violence and old-fashioned special effects, it’s still a genre classic.

Is it as good as you remember?

The Terminator understands that the ‘80s action hero is a special effect in himself (it is, almost always, himself). It uses Schwarzenegger as an object as much as it deploys him as an actor; he is the massive, still point around which the action of the film whirls incessantly. His monstrous physicality, his acting style and even his stilted Austrian accent are all used to emphasise the Terminator’s inhumanness, both as a character and as a presence.

It’s also one of the last physical special effects extravaganzas, if you’re nerdy about that sort of craft. (In Cameron’s2 original vision the Terminator was composed of shape-changing fluid metal but he couldn’t figure out how to do it until CGI came along in time for Terminator 2.) Of course physical effects carried on being used in movies after The Terminator, but they were complemented and increasingly supplanted by digital FX. To modern eyes the jerky stop-motion robot skeletons of the Terminators and the rubbery injuries of their victims are old-fashioned, but for its time the Stan Winston Studio’s work was astonishing. The Terminator is a wonderful example of a craft at its absolute height of accomplishment, and a totemic early example of ‘80s sci-fi action flicks.

James Cameron needs to be kept away from keyboards, because his dialogue progresses from thick-eared to thick-skulled and then thick-eared again as it comes out the other side. But what's not to love in the everyday story of a PTSD-suffering incel who falls in lust with a photo of a dead woman and then travels back in time to sleep with her so he can become his own best friend's dad?