Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981); The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980); Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947)

In his terrific new book Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema, Steven Rybin writes that the images in The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) "haunt us in ways that go beyond their functional place in a cleanly modulated, classical narrative, taking on, as so many images in Carpenter’s cinema do, a distinctive status as haunting details that remain with us long after the details of the narrative drive have been forgotten" (167). Rybin's contention here is, of course, the escape valve defenders of horror/slasher films wield to dismiss the genre's frequently sloppy narratives, especially their often risible endings. And while I agree with Rybin at least with respect to The Fog at its best, the narrative drive sometimes sticks with you despite your best efforts to go along with the style-over-substance defenses of the genre. This is an unenviable situation to find oneself in because you get pilloried if you dare to bring up some narrative inconsistency or even just request basic story information to make sense of the thing. 

Unfortunately for me, the one moment I remembered from Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) when I saw it first-run at 11 years old (!) was the scene with the hooker and the sailor in the train station phone booth. Given my age, I thought there was some arcane sex thing happening that caused the sailor to leave the phone booth in disgust. But over forty years later, watching the film again last week, I still don't know! Or rather, I know only slightly more. I'm assuming what happened is that the sailor came too quickly. I also assume that they're both upset about this because they had agreed on $30 for a 30-minute session. But a 30-minute blow job in a public place? Why is such a ludicrous deal even on the table? And why does the hooker get so initially upset about the sailor's quick nut? It's $30 for a job that took about a minute tops. 

OK so fine, I'm focusing on something drearily specific and ignoring all of De Palma's hallmark fireworks. But then why include this exchange in the first place? Since Burke (John Lithgow) is going to kill the hooker anyway, why not just have Burke proposition her and cut out the sailor entirely? And this in a scene which is extraneous to begin with as greyer eminences than me such as Robin Wood (in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond) have pointed out. Why not cut the fat and get to the fireworks that are De Palma's raison d'être? 

Criticism of this nature gets you accused of being one of what Hitchcock called "our old friends, the plausibles," those viewers who would ignore questions of form while harping on implausible plot points. The irony here is that the only such moment in Hitchcock's entire oeuvre that renders me a plausible, as opposed to dozens in De Palma's, is the scene in which Cary Grant holds onto the knife in Townsend's back in North by Northwest, an action I find narratively lazy. But all viewers become plausibles at some point, even De Palma's most ardent supporters. My plausibility meter gets triggered by violence, especially against women whose murdered bodies have been strewn across a century-plus of cinema. If a director is going to have a character murdered, then all the narrative t's better be crossed in order to justify the slaughter to whatever extent justification is even possible. If a murder is not going to approached with a certain amount of gravitas, then a narrative gaffe will only cheapen the effect and infuriate all the more. For me to accept an implausibility, there must be some other compensation beyond a gorgeous tracking shot or rococo set design. And I get it, misanthropes - humans are difficult to like. Let me hold off on any moral indignation to therefore state that it's easy and hence boring to imagine them slaughtered. Attempting to make even the barest of interpersonal connections with others would make for a fresher cinema if only because such a route is more difficult and hence consistently ignored by mainstream Hollywood filmmakers. (And quick, horror fans - name the actress who played the hooker).

Another irony is that the hooker/sailor scene did not cancel out whatever pleasure I took in Blow Out. In fact, I prefer it to Sisters, Carrie, Obsession, The Fury, and Dressed to Kill. It's never boring, the film production milieu is a cinephile's delight, and there are plenty of moments ridiculed by the plausibles that I'm perfectly fine with, namely, Jack's (John Travolta) reconstruction of the car crash via photographs from a magazine. A bigger problem, as always, is where the film winds up. Jack grows obsessed with pursuing justice for the Chappaquiddick-like incident he witnessed near the start of the film. Meanwhile, Burke is tasked with covering up the incident by killing Sally (Nancy Allen), the hooker who survived the car crash and can confirm what really happened on that bridge. Burke uses this convenience to become a serial killer and murder several other women in the hopes that Sally's eventual murder will be chalked up as merely one more thereby dissociating it from the car crash. The final shot confirms that Jack has abandoned his pursuit of justice in mourning Sally's murder. The film thus morphs from a political thriller into a slasher film, a trajectory that Chris Dumas, in his punky Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible, claims "makes Blow Out so difficult to read, to sort into coherence" (185). 

Quite to the contrary, Blow Out is all too coherent. It exemplifies Hollywood's compulsion for supplanting meditations on larger sociopolitical structures/institutions with stories driven by the psychology of an individual character. And it belongs to a distinctly post-1960s tradition of relinquishing oneself to the idea that corruption and violence are an indigenous part of American life and there's nothing one can do about it. In this respect, Blow Out is of a piece with such dubious faves as The Godfather saga and Chinatown. For Dumas, "this is how De Palma might be said to have a purely negative politics, as Adorno might be said to have had" (197), one which highlights how we are all whores with a price (200), how political crime "disappears in a blizzard of information noise," and how a "protagonist can only and always fail" (184). For me, it's permission to remain weak-willed and mutter "we're so fucked" when political corruption gets (or rather, continues to be) intense so we can hide our heads in the sand instead of organizing to fight. It's an insult to those who (foolishly, in this hopeless conception) hold doom at bay and battle for a better world. 

The Fog is certainly less ambitious than Blow Out. And its narrative is even more of a mess. As per horror ordinance, the ending is godawful; it's Carpenter admitting "oops - we forgot to kill off this important character so let's get that out of the way immediately before the end credits." And it has implausibilities that drive me bananas such as Jamie Lee Curtis wasted as a young gal implausibly (and quickly) falling for a man many years her senior (the few times it's the other way around, it's almost cause for a 20/20 exposé). But other implausibilities won my heart because they're not tied to violence and/or political resignation. For instance, Adrienne Barbeau's DJ is the source of much of the film's bizarre, even poetic charm. Implausibly, she plays a sort of cocktail jazz during her third-shift sets (I later discovered all of the songs are library music!). And there's a gorgeous shot of her implausibly playing station identification tapes (they sound eerily like number stations) on a cumbersome recorder as she descends a mammoth staircase to a lighthouse, the implausible location for her radio transmissions. Here is where implausibility shades into bafflement and the film takes on some of the hypnotic, indigestible quality of the best art films. By the climax, I didn't mind when she implausibly broadcasts to her listeners the trajectory of the murderous fog, tracking its every movement with a hilarious specificity (a paraphrase: "It's now winding its way down Applebury Lane right past Mrs. Fish's house!") 

Also lulling and attractive were the many shots of the still waters awaiting the fog's impending invasion. They reminded me of the infinitely superior Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947). One of the great head films, Le Tempestaire runs 23 minutes and does indeed feature a story. But it's merely a skeleton through which Epstein spaces out over the waters crashing off the coast of Brittany on Belle-Île-en-Mer. Through slow-motion, fast-motion, reverse, and long takes, Epstein transforms the titular tempest into a newly baptized form of nature, one with rules that transcend the natural world. It may be just as politically escapist as Blow Out. But it's far breezier and inexhaustible in its ability to dumbfound.

The version here has no English subtitles but you really don't need them. EDIT: Or you can enjoy it in better quality and with English subtitles here (thanks to the great Patrick Friel).

Blow Out: B+

The Fog: A-minus

Le Tempestaire: A+

The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975)

It's no surprise that it took nearly forty years for Nathanael West's 1939 novel The Day of the Locust to get any sort of Hollywood treatment if only because Hollywood, in the year of its greatest flowering, could never countenance such a venomous critique of its ubiquity. But the New Hollywood brats were running amok by the 1970s and West's disdain for Tinseltown was tailor-made for mavericks like Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt. For one thing, no classical Hollywood director could get away with a faithful airing of the novel's pulpier aspects of nasty violence. For another, the impressionistic, foreshortened chapters found a home in the discursive narratives championed by the New Hollywood directors and their supporters. Like the best of those films, The Day of the Locust dazzles in its indigestibility - its heroless trajectory, its dead-end scenes, its hothouse zoom-cured graphics. 

The only problem with both film and novel is that they traffic in an unearned contempt for humanity. West deserves plaudits for pulling off the paradoxical trick of excavating the interiorities of his most vacuous characters. Nowhere is this more effective as when Homer Simpson [sic] (played with contents-under-pressure subtlety by Donald Sutherland in the film) tries to fill the emptiness of his home by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" - "It was the only he song he knew." Pace Adorno, I cannot think of a more accurate depiction of a pathetic, incurious life. 

But because West subscribes to the theory that "nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure," his misanthropy gets wearying. Even in the opening pages, he portrays Los Angeles with no hope: "Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon."And as with any garden-variety misanthrope, he professes to know the interiority of the masses or at least the mass accrued outside a Hollywood premiere awaiting their allegorical death by immolation in the climax: "It allowed itself to be hustled and shoved out of habit and because it lacked an objective. It tolerated the police, just as a bull elephant does when he allows a small boy to drive him with a light stick." You get the impression that West feels they deserve the violence that befalls them because "[t]hey haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure." That last is particularly galling since it attributes moral failing in part to a lack of wealth. And it leaves no room to honor those without money who have the equipment for leisure and pleasure, staving off a meaninglessness to which West so weakly succumbs.

Grade: A-minus

Cats - The Jellicle Ball, Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York City (July 10)

Even lovers of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1981 musical Cats must concede that its first act especially is confusing which only underlines the problem with the through-sung musical - it's difficult to advance narrative through song. That's what all those recitatives and subtitles and program notes in opera are for. Those not enthralled by the spectacle or Webber's score have checked out in bewilderment by the third number. Cats has long since been Exhibit A for anyone disdainful of musical theatre - low-nutrition, flat-bottomed, readymade for tourists instead of the Serious Theatergoer. So when a friend invited me along to see Cats - The Jellicle Ball, a reimagining of the show told through the prism of the queer ballroom culture excavated by Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990), I wasn't expecting much, perhaps an episode of Pose bedizened with "Memory" and a few of the peppier numbers. What I couldn't have imagined is how utterly it would overwhelm me for all of its 2.5 hours. After over forty years, with direction by by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch and choreography by Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, Cats is finally a Great Musical. 

The reimagining is both radical and not. This is basically a production of Cats. No noticeable numbers or characters are eliminated or added. So the confusion remains, solidifying the notion that Cats is at heart a non-narrative show. The story concerns a clutter of cats vying for the chance to gain a new life in a celestial body called the Heaviside Layer. But this overall arc gets lost in the show's contest structure which gives each cat the spotlight for a number or two in an attempt to dazzle us. The genius of The Jellicle Ball is in realizing how perfectly Cats and ballroom culture work together. Drag balls are contests, not stories. They roll out categories (recall those from Paris is Burning such as Schoolboy/girl Realness, Town and Country, or Butch Queen First Time in Drags at a Ball) and a panel of judges declares a winner within each. With that structure in place, one gleaned by anyone familiar with RuPaul's Drag Race or HBO's Legendary, the audience is freed of narrative expectation. The cast aren't even cats; they're mostly Black and Latinx, mostly queer ball contenders. They're there to serve sickening looks and moves down the catwalk to get tens across the board and snatch a trophy. We are at a ball, not a diegetic event eliciting docile voyeurism, and thus, the production encourages the audience to honor the titanic talent on display with fan thworps and spontaneous hollering for an altogether immersive experience. As a gay man comfortable with jettisoning narrative and bored with distended second acts, I've never had more fun or been more moved at the theatre. 

Part of how The Jellicle Ball keeps the excitement up throughout is that every moment is suffused with the energy of the house and disco music heard at balls. This is not only a matter of undergirding the songs with an electronic dance beat; the staging and choreography emulate the very structure of disco and house music. Both related genres often rely on the break for their effectiveness on the dancefloor. The break is that part of the track where most of the elements drop out leaving only the percussion or perhaps the vocals to proceed. When the rest of the music finally returns (labeled the drop in DJ parlance), the effect can be so kinetic that dancers will wave their hands in the air, screaming and blowing whistles and ripping off their shirts in orgasmic ecstasy. A classic example is Armand Van Helden ft. Roland Clark's 1999 "Flowerz" with the break starting around 5:38 and the megaton drop occurring at 7:39 in this video.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening ensemble number "Prologue: Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats." The song builds in intensity until the backbeat slows and soon stops, allowing the cats to sing as an angelic choir. And then the number slams right back into a fast-paced chorus as if it never left. It's a spritzy enough moment in the original. But The Jellicle Ball sets it on fire. The ensemble is gathered at the far end of the runway for the angelic chorus. And when the drop occurs, they march down the runway in Chorus Line-precision sync with choreography evoking the catwalk moves of ball culture. The effect is like watching a stream of fabulous queer bodies shoot out of a canon, surpassing even the drop in "Flowerz" in intensity. It so overwhelmed me that I could've ran to the nearest corner and crouched down to sob. I feel lucky to have witnessed it. Recognizing that this is their money shot, The Perelman Performing Arts Center has chosen a rehearsal of this very moment to advertise the show generating over a million views on Instagram and kicking off a viral dance challenge. 

Anyone still requiring a three-act structure with psychologically well-rounded characters will recoil from The Jellicle Ball. Indeed, one might even claim that the non-narrative framework robs the Black and Latinx queer characters of their chance to tell their stories. But Cats is skeletal enough that The Jellicle Ball never falls into the trap of plastic representation - inserting BIPOC representation into a structure with no BIPOC import. Because the spatiotemporal nature of Cats is so fantastical and non-specific, the Jellicle Cats can occupy it without paying fealty to a diegesis unrelated to their lives. Their stories, their critical thought, their dismantling of the master's tools occur through their bodies which can travserse and abandon space as ball participants have done with gymnasiums, rec centers, dance halls, etc. André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy says precious few words. His age-etched visage brings the past to bear on the proceedings and commands respect with nary a muscle twitch. Junior LaBeija (the queen who spells out "opulence" in Paris is Burning) as Gus sits at a sideline table during intermission, radiating fabulosity in leopard print and long gold nails. And each incredible performer speaks to us in death drops and duck walks as much as through Webber's songs.

I doubt one could apply ball to any show. Titanic or Wicked or Phantom are too localized to stave off plastic representation (although Pippin provides an enticing possibility). And I doubt The Jellicle Ball would survive a move up to Broadway. The ball effect would become diluted up in the nosebleeds of a cavernous theatre. But unsurprisingly, the show's run at the Perelman, way downtown by One World Trade Center, has been extended to August 11th as of this writing. This is my paltry attempt to make sure it doesn't stop there.