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+
Labels: 1980s Hollywood, Brian De Palma, Hollywood, horror, Jean Epstein, John Carpenter, slasher films, The New Hollywood
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