Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Part 2: Influence & Legacy

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If you’re just join­ing this series in progress, you may wish to start with Part One, in which we chart The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s highly improb­a­ble leap from radio to TV.

Dou­glas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been adapted and extended into vir­tu­ally every media yet con­ceived by humankind — if more advanced species else­where in the galaxy are able to plug the story directly into their brains, they haven’t yet shared the tech­nol­ogy with us earth­lings. Back on Earth, Adams per­son­ally wrote the radio series (which many of those involved con­sider the defin­i­tive ur text), nov­els, a tele­vi­sion series, and com­puter game. Although nowhere near the level of cul­tural sat­u­ra­tion of its rough con­tem­po­rary Star Wars, it is fair to state that it is some­thing per­son­ally beloved by mil­lions, but also a rather valu­able fran­chise that placed quite a bur­den upon its cre­ator. Like George Lucas, Adams spent the rest of his life shep­herd­ing and pro­tect­ing, and yes, prof­it­ing off Hitchhiker’s.

Douglas AdamsDou­glas Adams and the answer to life, the uni­verse, and everything

Before and after Adams’ untimely death in 2001 — not that there is such a thing as a timely death — Hitchik­ers enjoyed a com­plex par­al­lel exis­tence in stage shows, licensed mer­chan­dise (includ­ing tow­els and rub­ber duck­ies), and addi­tional writ­ten works by other authors. The now-superstar author Neil Gaiman’s sec­ond book Don’t Panic — only slightly less hum­ble than his first, a Duran Duran hagiog­ra­phy — was a com­bi­na­tion biog­ra­phy of Adams and his­tory of Hitchhiker’s as a whole, clev­erly writ­ten in a rev­er­ent pas­tiche of Adams’ own style. DC Comics adapted the orig­i­nal sto­ries into comics form 1993–1997, after which things went rel­a­tively quiet until a 2005 fea­ture film failed to catch on with Amer­i­can movie goers. Direc­tor Garth Jennings’s movie has many flaws, the largest of which may sim­ply have been show­ing up too late to the fad­ing Hitchhiker’s party. But much of the cast­ing is inar­guably excel­lent, par­tic­u­larly Mar­tin Free­man as Arthur Dent and the voices of Stephen Fry and Alan Rick­man as The Guide and Mar­vin the Para­noid Android, respec­tively (read The Dork Report review). The movie may have failed to reignite fan fer­vor at its peak, but the nev­erend­ing tril­ogy got even longer when the Adams estate posthu­mously autho­rized a sixth prose novel by Artemis Fowl cre­ator Eoin Colfer in 2009.

Sam Rockwell, John Malkovich, Martin Freeman, Mos Def, and Zooey Deschanel in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyGet­ting the band back together for the 2005 fea­ture film

But the vast influ­ence of Adams’ orig­i­nal works is incal­cu­la­ble. I can’t speak to his influ­ence in his home coun­try, but he was an inte­gral com­po­nent of the holy trin­ity for a par­tic­u­lar strain of Anglophile geeks grow­ing up in Amer­ica in the 1970s and 80s: Monty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the holy Doc­tor Who, for­ever and ever amen. Rolling Stone mag­a­zine gave away 3,000 free copies of the first novel in 1981, guar­an­tee­ing count­less young unsuc­cess­ful bands called Dis­as­ter Area, one suc­cess­ful band called Level 42, and a gen­er­a­tion of col­lege kids heed­ing Ford Prefect’s sage advice to enjoy “Six pints of bit­ter, and quickly please, the world’s about to end.” The BCC tele­vi­sion com­edy Red Dwarf is a direct descen­dant (albeit, if any­thing, even more bit­terly bleak and nihilis­tic). As a cul­tural insti­tu­tion, Hitchhiker’s was still hip enough in 1997 to inspire the Radio­head song title “Para­noid Android”.

Adams, together with fel­low imp Tom Baker, for­ever stamped Doc­tor Who with its sig­na­ture blend of hard sci­ence, absur­dist humor, and barely sub­merged dark­ness. The ideal recipe is still debated to this day, per­haps most evi­dent in Christo­pher Eccleston’s par­tic­u­larly bipo­lar vision of the char­ac­ter as swing­ing wildly between anguished and giddy — at once griev­ing his com­plic­ity in the death of his entire species, but not so despair­ing that he couldn’t fall in love with a cute young blonde earth­ling named Rose Tyler (The Doc­tor! In love! Almost as unthink­able as the roman­tic mis­ad­ven­tures that would befall Arthur after the largely sex­less early install­ments of Hitchhiker’s). But in 1979, for those British fans that pre­ferred wit & whimsy over revers­ing the polar­ity of the neu­tron flow, they could switch the telly over to BBC Two to watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Peter Davison in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyFifth Doc­tor Peter Davi­son appears as The Dish of the Day in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC series

As my fre­quent Doc­tor Who asides above prove, it’s vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to dis­cuss Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with­out a few detours into Whov­ian mat­ters — not least because Fifth Doc­tor Peter Davi­son famously cameos in the tele­vi­sion series as the excep­tion­ally rare (and chatty) steak served at the Restau­rant at the End of the Uni­verse. I first read the nov­els as a kid, com­pletely unaware of their radio or TV incar­na­tions. I quite lit­er­ally pic­tured Ford Pre­fect as The Doc­tor (specif­i­cally, the highly eccen­tric Tom Baker’s unfor­get­table per­for­mance as the Fourth Doc­tor). When my local PBS affil­i­ate finally ran the TV series, I was quite dis­ap­pointed to find that David Dixon is very nearly the phys­i­cal oppo­site of Baker; and not nearly as… well, alien.

David Dixon, Mark Wing-Davey, and Sandra Dickinson in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyDavid Dixon, Mark Wing-Davey, and San­dra Dick­in­son in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC series

Tril­lian, who appears for the first time in episode two, was another huge dis­ap­point­ment. Whether by her own act­ing choices, con­tem­po­rary cul­tural mores, or the whims of a randy cos­tume depart­ment, actress San­dra Dick­in­son pitches the char­ac­ter as even dumber and more sexed up than a typ­i­cal Doc­tor Who com­pan­ion, which is really say­ing some­thing (thank­fully, 21st Cen­tury Who Girls gen­er­ally enjoy much more sub­stan­tial char­ac­ter­i­za­tion). She and Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Bee­ble­brox both sport exag­ger­ated Amer­i­can accents that make me scratch my head as much as our sil­li­est mock British accents must irri­tate actual Britons (adden­dum: I have since learned that Dick­in­son is actu­ally Amer­i­can, so I don’t know what it means that her accent sounded fake to me). Dick­in­son would later marry Davi­son, and their daugh­ter Geor­gia Mof­fett would in turn wed actor David Ten­nant (mak­ing the Fifth Doc­tor the Tenth Doctor’s father-in-law — and this is with­out any real-life time travel). It’s as if Adams is still work­ing beyond the grace as the behind-the-scenes match­maker keep­ing it all in the Doc­tor Who fam­ily — and I haven’t even got­ten around to dis­cussing Lalla Ward and Richard Dawkins yet.

Lalla Ward and Tom Baker in Doctor WhoDou­glas Adams as Doc­tor Who match­maker Part 1: Lalla Ward and Tom Baker

But the sin­gle great­est reper­cus­sion of Hitchhiker’s has noth­ing to do with Radio­head songs, the rel­a­tive eccen­tric­ity of Doc­tor Who lead­ing men, or spin­off mer­chan­dise. It is, sim­ply, the Apple iPhone. Allow me to be approx­i­mately the mil­lionth per­son to point out that the epony­mous guide itself has since become a very real thing, col­lect­ing lint in the bathrobe pock­ets of mil­lions of Earth­lings. It took a num­ber of iter­a­tions of numer­ous inter­lock­ing com­po­nents for it to hap­pen, and it’s not hard to imag­ine that Adams was a direct influ­ence on the vision­ary nerds that invented and assem­bled them. Com­put­ers were net­worked together in the 1960s, an infi­nite num­ber of Ford Pre­fects began to crowd-source Wikipedia in 2001, and then devices small enough to carry all of this around began to appear in the 1990s (I remem­ber really lust­ing after the mag­i­cal Palm VII, which was capa­ble of retriev­ing your email out of thin air). These ele­ments finally came together in 2007 with the first truly usable portable infor­ma­tion device, Apple’s iPhone — an inven­tion I’m sure Adams would agree is more use­ful than even the towel. Wikipedia’s the­o­ret­i­cally infi­nite hyper­linked data­base full of per­sis­tently and instantly avail­able infor­ma­tion proved about as reli­able as the Hitchhiker’s Guide, loaded as it is with dense entries on frip­peries like where to find the finest Pan-Galactic Gar­gle­blaster, while hav­ing lit­tle com­ment on an entire lifebear­ing planet like, say, Earth. To quote the first edi­tion: “Harm­less.” Sec­ond, exten­sively revised & expanded edi­tion: “Mostly harmless.”

Peter Davison and David Tennant in Doctor WhoDou­glas Adams as Doc­tor Who match­maker Part 2: David Ten­nant and father-in-law Peter Davison

So what is it that makes Hitchhiker’s so endur­ingly pop­u­lar? It’s not too dif­fi­cult to decode its DNA: Adams’ involve­ment in Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity sketch com­edy groups, his writ­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions with Gra­ham Chap­man of Monty Python, and his appre­ci­a­tion of clas­sic sci­ence fic­tion (par­tic­u­larly Kurt Von­negut and the British insti­tu­tion Doc­tor Who). But Hitchhiker’s is not a sequel, par­ody, adap­ta­tion, or pas­tiche of any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. Although it plays with many tropes of sci­ence fic­tion, it was a gen­uinely new thing. Adams had the fol­low­ing to say of Amer­i­can TV audi­ences, but I think it’s valid as a uni­ver­sal statement:

“Audi­ences in the US (through no fault of their own) are treated as com­plete idiots by the peo­ple who make pro­grammes. And when you’ve been treated as an idiot for so long you tend to respond that way. But when given some­thing with a bit more sub­stance they tend to breathe a deep sigh of relief and say ‘Thank God for that!’”
–Dou­glas Adams, quoted in Don’t Panic by Neil Gaiman, page 94

Adams gave peo­ple some­thing with a bit more sub­stance, and they seized upon it. His ideas were so orig­i­nal that Adams spent most of his lat­ter career patiently explain­ing where they came from. NPR’s Marc Hirsh has a more pes­simistic take, equat­ing James Cameron’s recent announce­ment that he would only make films set in the Avatar uni­verse to the trap that Adams found him­self in:

[Adams] spent the last 23 years of his life, start­ing from the orig­i­nal 1978 radio broad­cast, con­tin­u­ally rewrit­ing the same story over and over for dif­fer­ent media. And as much as I love the books and have enjoyed many of the dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions, I can’t help but think that that’s an almost tragic waste of tal­ent.
– Marc Hirsh, NPR (via Neil Gaiman)

True, he must have been frus­trated to not be able to move beyond Hitchhiker’s for most of his career, but one need only look at book­store shelves today to see almost every­thing he wrote still hap­pily in print, includ­ing two nov­els in a new series star­ring holis­tic detec­tive Dirk Gen­tly. Writ­ing and man­ag­ing the Hitchhiker’s empire was evi­dently a slow and painful task for him, and he wasted a lot of time strug­gling to bring Hitchhiker’s to BBC TV and Hol­ly­wood, with mixed results. But out­side of his nom­i­nal career as a writer, he would seem to have lived a rich life full of close friends (includ­ing lumi­nar­ies as diverse as Richard Dawkins and Dave Gilmour), good deeds (q.v. his book Last Chance to See, on endan­gered species), and think­ing deep thoughts.

Thanks for read­ing Part Two of The Dork Reports look back at Hitchhiker’s. Catch up with Part One, on the trou­bled pro­duc­tion of the TV series, and look for­ward to part two, in which we look at how Adams irrev­er­ently poked entire reli­gions and schools of thought in the eye.

Offi­cial Dou­glas Adams site: www.douglasadams.com

Offi­cial BBC site: www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers

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Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Part 1: From Radio to TV

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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy BBC TV poster

 

British view­ers may not blink twice, but it is always inter­est­ing for this Yank to note the priv­i­leged billing given to screen­writ­ers in BBC pro­grams. The open­ing cred­its for the 1981 ser­ial The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy promi­nently hail “By DOUGLAS ADAMS” directly below its dra­mat­i­cally rocky logo, over­shad­ow­ing the cast, direc­tors, and pro­duc­ers. This is cer­tainly not the case for typ­i­cal Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions, which tend to bury the lowly writer’s credit in type so small and fleet­ing that it’s hard to spot even if you’re look­ing for it. Shows tend to be pop­u­larly known more for their cast or some­times the cor­po­ra­tion that pro­duced it (exhibit A: the hard-earned pres­tige sta­tus enjoyed by HBO). A pre­cious few cre­ators may have become known com­modi­ties in their own right, such as the rare cases of Chris Carter (The X-Files), J.J. Abrams (Lost), and David Simon (The Wire), but by and large writ­ers remain effec­tively anony­mous on Amer­i­can television.

Aside from BBC stan­dards and prac­tice for onscreen accred­i­ta­tion, and the fact that the Adams name itself had become a brand, one could argue that he mer­ited such recog­ni­tion for sheer work ethic alone. Between 1978 and 1981, Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at least five times: as a radio play, novel, record album, stage show, and tele­vi­sion series (granted, some of these were col­lab­o­ra­tions, but the point still stands). All this while serv­ing as script edi­tor for the 17th sea­son of Doc­tor Who, which entailed sup­ply­ing three of his own scripts (The Pirate Planet, City of Death, and Shada) in addi­tion to heav­ily rewrit­ing many oth­ers. The Doc­tor Who tra­di­tion of divided loy­al­ties would con­tinue well into the 21st cen­tury as showrun­ners Rus­sell T Davies and Steven Mof­fat would moon­light on Torch­wood, The Sarah Jane Adven­tures, and Sher­lock. The only pos­si­ble con­clu­sion to draw is that doing Doc­tor Who is evi­dently easy, and pro­vides lots of free time for extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties. I’m sure Rus­sell and Steven will agree, right guys?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyThe open­ing cred­its of the BBC TV pro­duc­tion of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy assert that the orig­i­nal radio series is the defin­i­tive article.

By all accounts, includ­ing his own, writ­ing would not seem to have come easy for Adams. The sus­tained cre­ative frenzy that pro­duced Hitch­hik­ers in all its forms would have burned any nor­mal per­son out. That he pulled it off proves he may not have been a nor­mal per­son, but it made him a more finan­cially com­fort­able man that indeed never met another dead­line again: “I love dead­lines. I like the whoosh­ing sound they make as they fly by.” Indeed, Hitch­hik­ers’ run­away suc­cess afforded him the wealth to buy as many Apple Mac­in­toshes as he wanted, and to take his sweet time adapt­ing and extend­ing the Hitch­hik­ers uni­verse into more nov­els, audio books, an influ­en­tial text-based hyper­tex­tual com­puter game, and a stage show.

I per­son­ally con­sider the books to be defin­i­tive, mostly because that’s how I hap­pened to first expe­ri­ence the story. In fact, it was years until I learned that its orig­i­nal incar­na­tion as a radio series so much as existed. Writer Gareth Roberts, an expert on Adams-era Doc­tor Who, observed that the first two Hitch­hik­ers books aren’t tech­ni­cally nov­els, but essen­tially nov­el­iza­tions of his scripts for the radio show. Fur­ther bump­ing the books down the hier­ar­chy of rel­a­tive defin­i­tive­ness, the open­ing cred­its of the TV series pro­claim it’s “Adapted from the BBC Radio Series” even though it fol­lowed the novel, which itself roughly cor­re­spond­ing to the first four radio episodes. Got that?

The first episode was a (very expen­sive) pilot, and could very well have been all we have today. Even after a full series was com­mis­sioned, each sub­se­quent episode begins with a clev­erly done recap, typ­i­cally fea­tur­ing excerpts from the tit­u­lar Guide that segue into a res­o­lu­tion of the pre­vi­ous episode’s cliffhanger. The inte­gra­tion of ani­ma­tion into the live action footage reflects Adams’ highly digres­sive writ­ing style, now de rigueur to audi­ences raised in an online, hyper­linked cul­ture. Per­haps the sole ele­ment of the TV series that every­one can agree is excel­lent is the faux-computer ani­ma­tion, which was actu­ally cre­ated man­u­ally using tra­di­tional cel ani­ma­tion tech­niques by Rod Lord of Pearce Studios.

Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyAn exam­ple of the ersatz “com­puter” ani­ma­tion cre­ated out­side the BBC by Rod Lord of Pearce Studios.

Neil Gaiman ded­i­cates Chap­ter 13 of his book Don’t Panic, about the Hitch­hik­ers phe­nom­e­non, to the painful pro­duc­tion of the tele­vi­sion series. Indeed, it seems to have man­aged to dis­ap­point just about every­one: fans, crit­ics, the BBC, and at least two war­ring fac­tions on the cre­ative team, includ­ing (and per­haps espe­cially) Adams him­self. He had wished to involve his trusted col­lab­o­ra­tors John Lloyd and Geof­frey Perkins, but all three were shut out by entrenched BBC TV lif­ers that looked down their noses at mere radio peo­ple. Fur­ther doom­ing things, pro­duc­tion was han­dled by the BBC’s Light Enter­tain­ment divi­sion, despite the Drama depart­ment hav­ing all the expe­ri­ence and know-how any­one could ask for after hav­ing han­dled many years worth of Doc­tor Who serials.

Gaiman doc­u­ments a high state of ten­sion between producer/director Alan Bell and seem­ingly every­one else. Bell was report­edly skilled at bring­ing pro­duc­tions in on time and under bud­get, but less inter­ested in story or direct­ing actors. Gaiman quotes many vet­er­ans of the orig­i­nal radio series that felt Bell’s direc­tion and stag­ing was often art­less and unsym­pa­thetic to the unique mate­r­ial. The pedestrian-looking result­ing pro­gram must have stung, as the orig­i­nal radio team had all shown con­sid­er­able tech­ni­cal ambi­tion in real­iz­ing the unprece­dented sound design of the radio series (Geof­frey Perkins details the extra­or­di­nary labor it took to cre­ate vir­tu­ally all of the voice and sound effects from scratch in the book The Orig­i­nal Hitch­hiker Radio Scripts — con­trary to what one might assume, the leg­endary BBC Radio­phonic Work­shop didn’t con­tribute much). A sec­ond series was com­mis­sioned, but Adams’ stand­off with Bell con­tributed to its can­cel­la­tion before it came any­where close to begin­ning. Bell claims Adams missed his script dead­lines as usual, and Adams coun­ters he sim­ply would not start writ­ing until nego­ti­a­tions con­cluded to include Perkins and Lloyd as advi­sors (this is a bru­tally con­densed ver­sion of the whole sad story, avail­able in full circa page 84 of the first edi­tion of Don’t Panic). I take Adams’ side on this one, as my career as a web designer has made me all too famil­iar with the pit­falls of begin­ning work before you have a contract.

The pilot episode opens on a rather decent model land­scape of a quaint Eng­lish vil­lage, com­plete with ersatz sun­rise. This bucolic scene is, of course, not long for this world. We soon meet Adams’ arche­typal every­man Arthur Dent, played by Simon Jones, who actu­ally resem­bles Dou­glas Adams in stature and coif­fure. Athur’s home and home planet are about to become casu­al­ties of two coin­ci­den­tal bureau­cratic mishaps. As if Arthur didn’t have enough to deal with this dread­ful morn­ing, his pal Ford Pre­fect outs him­self as being a rov­ing reporter for the epony­mous pub­li­ca­tion The Hitch­hik­ers’ Guide to the Galaxy, hail­ing “from a small planet some­where in the vicin­ity of Betel­geuse”. Inci­den­tally, everyone’s favorite star — once they learn how to pro­nounce it — is itself expected to explode “soon”. But Ford, if he’s out there, may rest easy, for in the minds of astro­physi­cists, “soon” means any­time between now and 1,000,000 years hence. Per­haps the exact date is avail­able on a slip of paper in a sub­base­ment of a Vogon plan­ning com­mis­sion office some­where in the galaxy.

But back to the TV series. Much of the radio cast reprise their roles onscreen, and it cer­tainly plays that way. Its prose ori­gins are betrayed by a few rec­og­niz­ably over­writ­ten scenes, such as when Arthur and Ford redun­dantly describe the hal­lu­ci­na­tions they suf­fer in episode two, as if the audi­ence couldn’t plainly see them for them­selves. The down­side is that the TV series comes across like an abridged great­est hits com­pi­la­tion of Adams’ most quotable lines (“Time is an illu­sion; lunchtime dou­bly so”). The upside is… well, it comes across like an abridged great­est hits of the most quotable lines (“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”).

While the out­door loca­tion work is grounded in real­ity, the studio-shot sequences are the­atri­cal in pre­sen­ta­tion, with long takes staged against tra­di­tional three-walled stu­dio sets. The non-naturalistic light­ing often works against the story, espe­cially as Ford squints by the fee­ble light of a match to locate a plainly vis­i­ble light switch in the brightly illu­mi­nated bow­els of the Vogon ship. Arthur (who had admit­tedly just been through a lot) is unim­pressed with the “shabby” ves­sel. Know­ing the author and con­text, this word choice is very likely an ironic com­ment on the art direc­tion. To be fair, later sequences are staged more dra­mat­i­cally (such as the forced-perspective gang­ways sur­round­ing the mas­sive super­com­puter Deep Thought).

If you want to argue about how Hitch­hik­ers looks on tele­vi­sion, I think that sci-fi on the small screen ought not to be judged in terms of what was on the big screen at the time. Doc­tor Who still gets a lot of grief for its dodgy pro­duc­tion val­ues, but recall that it pre­miered in 1963, long before the styl­is­tic and tech­no­log­i­cal spe­cial effects break­throughs show­cased in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977), and Alien (1979), so it’s a bit unfair to judge, isn’t it? It’s only a rather recent devel­op­ment that the pro­duc­tion qual­i­ties of sci­ence fic­tion on tele­vi­sion began to match the sorts of effects you can see in fea­ture films. In this viewer’s opin­ion, the cur­rent best-of-breed visual effects on tele­vi­sion haven’t yet topped Bat­tlestar Galac­tica (read The Dork Report review), which fea­tured outer space dog­fights that matched or exceeded what is rou­tinely show­cased in Hol­ly­wood fea­tures — per­haps even by what is arguably the highest-profile genre series cur­rently on the air, HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyMark Wing-Davey (and the faulty ani­ma­tronic head that cost more than his fee) as Zaphod Bee­ble­brox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As was (and is) the case with Doc­tor Who, you have to take the good with the bad. Is there any point cri­tiquing Hitchhiker’s dodgy spe­cial effects, even con­sid­er­ing the year (1981), medium (tele­vi­sion), and bud­get (low)? Inso­far was any­one could have pre­dicted audi­ence expec­ta­tions, they likely tuned in more to savor Adams’ price­less words and ideas, not state-of-the-art spec­ta­cle. Here’s orig­i­nal pro­ducer Geof­frey Perkins on the topic of the para­dox­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions and free­dom of the radio drama for­mat, and the unex­pected reper­cus­sions when the ser­ial was later adapted into other media:

“The line about [Zaphod’s] extra head was put in as a lit­tle extra throw­away joke which was to cause enor­mous headaches (sic) when the show was trans­ferred to tele­vi­sion. The extra head cost about twice as much as Mark [Wing-Davey] him­self (though he thinks that was fair enough because it gave a bet­ter per­for­mance than he did!). In fact much of the time the head didn’t func­tion prop­erly and used to loll on his shoul­der look­ing up at him, often end­ing up being oper­ated by a man with his hand up Mark’s back.“
–Geof­frey Perkins, The Orig­i­nal Hitch­hiker Radio Scripts, page 50

It’s inter­est­ing, and I think sig­nif­i­cant, that he uses the word “trans­ferred” to describe the adap­ta­tion process. At the time of the pub­li­ca­tion of the radio scripts in 1985, Perkins and Adams still viewed them as the defin­i­tive article.

Now that we’ve cov­ered some of the nuts and bolts of how Hitch­hik­ers found itself on TV, stay tuned for two fur­ther instal­la­tions in The Dork Report’s look back at the series: in which we will dis­cuss its influ­ence & legacy, and sta­tus as a gate­way drug for many future atheists.

Offi­cial BBC site: www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

 

Sad Dinosaurs: Calling Bullshit on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

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The Tree of Life movie poster

 

As a pub­lic ser­vice, The Dork Report will now sum­ma­rize all 2 hours and 19 min­utes of Ter­rence Malick’s The Tree of Life for you:

My mommy was pretty, my daddy was mean, some­times kids die, I inhaled too much DDT, and it makes me so sad. Sad like the lonely birth of the life­less uni­verse. Sad like an anachro­nis­tic demon­stra­tion of ani­mal altru­ism in the cruel dinosaur-eat-dinosaur pre­his­toric bios­phere. Sad like the decay of all mat­ter and energy as the uni­verse inevitably collapses.

I call bullshit.

The degree of enjoy­ment I took from The Tree of Life was in inverse pro­por­tion to the sense of oblig­a­tion I felt to see it, which is to say: very lit­tle vs. a whole lot. The very pri­vate auteur Mal­ick had fallen silent for a num­ber of years after he burst out of the gate in the 70s with Bad­lands and Days of Heaven, but has been on some­thing of an unchar­ac­ter­is­tic tear lately, pro­duc­ing three films in 10 years, with more in the pipeline. Since he chooses to not par­tic­i­pate in pub­lic­ity for his films, we may have to wait years until we find out what moti­vated him to return from this mys­te­ri­ous interregnum.

The Tree of LifeNo one was there to watch as the plan­ets form from star­dust… except Ter­rence Malick’s computers

Antic­i­pa­tion high, The Tree of Life was hotly dis­cussed as his most beau­ti­ful, philo­soph­i­cal, and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film yet (the last point being espe­cially tan­ta­liz­ing to film buffs look­ing for entry points into ana­lyz­ing the man and his ouvre from a dis­tance). The hook was fur­ther baited by the all-star cast (Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and it-girl-who’s-in-everything-these-days Jes­sica Chas­tain) and an awards cam­paign brand­ing it as one of the key pres­tige pic­tures of 2011. The will­ing­ness of top-drawer tal­ent to work with Mal­ick, even if they may very well wind up on the cut­ting room floor (as hap­pened to George Clooney in The Thin Red Line), sug­gests he is revered as a direc­tor of actors. The peren­ni­ally prickly Sean Penn, how­ever, had none of this. He pub­licly derided the com­pleted film:

While [Penn] con­sid­ered the script “the most mag­nif­i­cent one that I’ve ever read,” he believes that “a clearer and more con­ven­tional nar­ra­tive would have helped the film with­out, in my opin­ion, less­en­ing its beauty and its impact.” Not­ing that Mal­ick him­self was lit­tle help when it came to explain­ing what he was going for, Penn adds, “Frankly, I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what I’m doing there and what I was sup­posed to add in that con­text.“
– The A.V. Club

All of Malick’s films are inar­guably stag­ger­ingly beau­ti­ful, but their flimsy sub­stance would get laughed out of a high school cre­ative writ­ing class. The Thin Red Line pro­vided a much-needed med­i­ta­tive coun­ter­point at the time to the com­par­a­tively sen­ti­men­tal Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan, but too much of the film was taken up with the pri­vate thoughts of inar­tic­u­late grunts strug­gling to under­stand why they were killing each other when they’d all be much hap­pier as cin­e­matog­ra­phers film­ing wildlife and sun­light fil­ter­ing pret­tily through tree­tops. The New World approached out­right silli­ness in its por­trayal of Poc­a­hon­tas as a pim­ply teenager in leather lin­gerie, caught in a love tri­an­gle over two of her Euro­pean oppres­sors, and became truly absurd as the film con­torted itself to avoid speak­ing her name.

Jessica Chastain and an unnamed dinosaur extra in Terrance Malick's The Tree of LifeI want to equate these two shots to the famous jump cut from pre­his­toric man to a space­ship in Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I just don’t respect The Tree of Life enough.

There’s some­thing to be said about Mal­ick decon­struct­ing two of the most overused sub­jects in Hol­ly­wood his­tory (the World War II pic­ture and the Poc­a­hon­tas myth) for his own per­sonal state­ments, but crit­ics must really strain for these to hold up to dis­cus­sion in seri­ous philo­soph­i­cal terms. The Niles Files makes a valiant attempt to tackle The Tree of Life, loop­ing in Blake, Proust, Joyce, and many other big guns to extract some mean­ing from Malick’s pretty pictures.

The Tree of Life was part of a minia­ture trendlet in movies this past year, in which the painfully inti­mate was equated with the dis­tantly cos­mic. Sadly, two bet­ter films with sim­i­lar con­cerns were unjustly crowded out of the award sea­son — curi­ously, both fea­tur­ing young women. In Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, a girl whose care­less­ness ruined sev­eral lives finds hope for redemp­tion when an exact dupli­cate of the entire planet inex­plic­a­bly appears in the sky. Like every­one that has ever lived, she won­ders if maybe there’s a bet­ter world where things turned out dif­fer­ently. For Cahill, it would have super­flu­ous to con­coct a pseu­do­sci­en­tific expla­na­tion for the phe­nom­ena, but another film­maker that same year turned to physi­cists to prop­erly sub­stan­ti­ate his cos­mic visions. Lars Von Trier’s Melan­cho­lia is exactly that — a painful but stun­ningly beau­ti­ful exam­i­na­tion of crip­pling depres­sion. One young woman’s men­tal ill­ness all but splin­ters her extended fam­ily, a destruc­tion so cat­a­clysmic it is reflected in the erad­i­ca­tion of the world. Von Trier har­nesses com­puter ani­ma­tion for images of pro­foundly mov­ing beauty, ren­der­ing Malick’s mopey CGI dinos silly in comparison.

Offi­cial movie site: www.twowaysthroughlife.com

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Apart Hate: District 9

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District 9 movie poster

 

Dis­trict 9 is an old story told many times in fic­tion and his­tory: an unde­sir­able group intrudes upon the space and resources of priv­i­leged power pos­ses­sors. This story never ends well. Dis­trict 9’s highly alle­gor­i­cal cul­ture clash cor­re­sponds to great many groups that have suf­fered in through­out his­tory, many sadly ongo­ing: refugees, minori­ties, Roma, Jews, or immi­grants. But hey, this time it’s aliens!

Peter Jack­son pro­duced writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s fea­ture length ver­sion of his short film “Alive in Joburg”. The con­cept is closely related to Gra­ham Baker’s 1988 sci-fi cop buddy pic­ture Alien Nation (devel­oped by Ken­neth John­son for a TV series the fol­low­ing year), in which a fully-packed slave ship is sud­denly aban­doned on Earth. The slaves may have been freed, but stranded in a hos­tile, crowded alien world with no room for them, even if the natives didn’t find them dis­taste­ful. Alien Nation found its drama in the fric­tion on both sides as the freed slaves are absorbed into human soci­ety in a vari­ety of ways.

District 9“When deal­ing with aliens, try to be polite, but firm. And always remem­ber that a smile is cheaper than a bullet.”

Dis­trict 9 is far more vague about its aliens’ nature and more cyn­i­cal about the pos­si­bil­ity of their inte­gra­tion. The ship they arrived in may not even have belonged to them, oth­er­wise they would pre­sum­ably have been more inclined to attempt to repair it or at least live aboard. Were they an exploited labor force, or what we would call slaves? If so, what hap­pened to their cap­tors? The trailer includes at least one scene not included in the fin­ished film, in which an alien inter­ro­gated by human police implies that they are pre­vent­ing them from repair­ing their ship, when all they want to do is go home. This sim­ple sen­ti­ment is never expressed by any alien char­ac­ter in the movie. In fact, more of them seem con­tent to sim­ply live in squalor. Why can’t or won’t they sim­ply tell us who they are or what they want?

Dis­trict 9 is com­prised of an awk­wardly stitched together mélange of gen­res, less seam­lessly than how Alien Nation merged the buddy cop drama with sci­ence fic­tion. For most of its run­ning time, Dis­trict 9 works as a faux­men­tary made of osten­si­bly found footage. The faux­men­tary has long been a for­mat for farce (q.v. Zelig and This is Spinal Tap), but in later years The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead (read The Dork Report review), and Clover­field (read The Dork Report review) all found ways to effec­tively employ the style for hor­ror, drama, and sci­ence fic­tion. The ongo­ing wave of real­ity tele­vi­sion and the run-and-gun hand­held style in vogue since Paul Green­grass’ kinetic The Bourne Supremacy are no doubt con­tribut­ing to the trend of includ­ing the “cam­era” as, essen­tially, a char­ac­ter in the film.

The faux­men­tary pre­tense is upheld for quite a while, until it sud­denly shifts to a priv­i­leged point of view for a scene in which three alien char­ac­ters speak­ing in con­fi­dence, with­out the vir­tual “cam­era” present. This shift is jar­ring, as we’ve pre­vi­ously wit­nessed every­thing from the point of view of the absent pro­tag­o­nist. It sig­nals the begin­ning of a more tra­di­tional nar­ra­tive, albeit one still visu­al­ized with the same aes­thetic. It’s as if Blomkamp stuck to a first-person point of view until it became incon­ve­nient, so sim­ply shifted to third-person while pre­serv­ing the same visual aesthetic.

If the audi­ence didn’t already con­tract whiplash, Dis­trict 9 then dips into the body hor­ror genre as Wikus (Sharlto Cop­ley) under­goes a meta­mor­pho­sis à la David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Even this doesn’t hold Blomkamp’s atten­tion, and the film about-faces once again, this time into a standard-issue sci-fi action flick like Aliens (with a dash of Black Hawk Down). For its grand finale, it sud­denly crashes back into fauxmentary.

District 9“Dis­trict 9 — Paving the Way to Unity.”

The shift­ing gen­res and points of view mir­ror Wikus’ char­ac­ter arc. Ini­tially a basi­cally sym­pa­thetic com­pany man, he turns vil­lain­ous in our eyes when he dis­plays vicious speciesism by destroy­ing an alien hatch­ery with undis­guised glee. His cos­mic pun­ish­ment is for his body to painfully mutate into that which he hates and fears the most (again, an arche­typal Croneneber­gian theme), after which he comes around to being sym­pa­thetic again. The end­ing is very effec­tive in remind­ing us how far Wikus has trans­formed, body and mind, since we first met him.

Dis­trict 9 is rid­dled with a num­ber of irri­tat­ingly illog­i­cal ele­ments, which are unclear if meant to be mys­ter­ies for the audi­ence to pon­der or if just out­right plot holes or implau­si­bil­i­ties. Most refugee sit­u­a­tions in human his­tory involve oppressed peo­ple with no polit­i­cal or mil­i­tary power. These aliens pos­sess fero­ciously pow­er­ful weapons, but don’t use them to fight for bet­ter con­di­tions or more food and resources. If they are so tech­no­log­i­cally advanced, why do they not also have some kind of func­tional soci­etal order, as opposed to the self-defeating chaotic shanty town they’ve con­structed for them­selves? Per­haps the tech­nol­ogy belonged to their mys­te­ri­ous and unseen cap­tors, or maybe their ill-behavior is explained by the break­down of order the occurs in any kind of refugee sce­nario. More ques­tions: How can one lit­tle alien child, born on earth, have the know-how to reac­ti­vate the moth­er­ship? Why did it take 20 years for any of them to har­vest the nec­es­sary mate­ri­als from their own scrap? Surely more than two adult aliens could orga­nize them­selves to bet­ter har­vest their own waste.

It would nor­mally be reduc­tive to search for a “moral of the story” from even the sim­plest film — the kind of assign­ment given to an ele­men­tary school read­ing com­pre­hen­sion essay. But since Dis­trict 9 is clearly mak­ing an obvi­ous point about racism and xeno­pho­bia, it has to be said that it shoots itself in the foot with its extremely prob­lem­atic depic­tion of Nige­ri­ans as gang­sters and can­ni­bals. Granted, the Niger­ian char­ac­ters don’t come off that much bet­ter than the white South Africans we see con­duct­ing cruel genetic research on both humans and aliens.

Set­ting the film in South Africa was per­haps the least sub­tle way pos­si­ble to present any kind of sci­ence fic­tion alle­gory for racism and xeno­pho­bia — at least since Star Trek: Enter­prise dressed rep­til­ian Xindi vil­lains in Nazi uni­forms in 2004 (just in case the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence didn’t pick up on the unsub­tle pun in the species’ name). It’s per­haps more com­fort­able to think that these types of sit­u­a­tions have occurred in iso­lated places through­out his­tory: in Nazi Ger­many, Rwanda, or Arme­nia. The alien refugee camps are of course most directly anal­o­gous to South Africa under Apartheid — the title itself allud­ing to the forcible evic­tion of Dis­trict Six in Cape Town to Cape Flats in 1966. By con­trast, Alien Nation made the more pro­found point that the same thing could hap­pen anywhere.

Offi­cial movie sites: www.d-9.com, www.district9movie.com, and www.MNUSpreadsLies.com

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Untangling The Terminator Timeline

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The Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise is cooked from a core recipe of cyborgs, time travel, bul­lets, and explo­sions, sea­soned with themes of des­tiny, para­noia, and techno­pho­bia. Sub­tract or sub­sti­tute too many of these ingre­di­ents and you wind up with some­thing not-Terminator. Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion is the first episode to dare to omit the foun­da­tional time travel ele­ment. Its “present” is the post-apocalyptic future we only glimpsed in the pre­vi­ous films, and the clos­est thing to time travel is the very con­ven­tional sto­ry­telling con­ceit of a flash­back. It’s curi­ous that in a media land­scape where frac­tured, non-chronological nar­ra­tives are the norm (par­tic­u­larly on tele­vi­sion, most notably in Lost and Break­ing Bad) that the Ter­mi­na­tor series would retreat to a safer, more lin­ear nar­ra­tive structure.

While one might imag­ine that would result in a more straight­for­ward con­tin­u­a­tion of the saga, I found it raised more ques­tions than it answered. I’m either over– or under­think­ing things, or more likely expect­ing too much of a post-exhausted escapist action fran­chise, but the Ter­mi­na­tor chronol­ogy seems more entan­gled with para­doxes than ever. Let’s start with a con­densed overview of the four fea­ture films to date, com­piled from Wikipedia, Empire Online, io9, and the Ter­mi­na­tor Wiki. For simplicity’s sake, I’m omit­ting The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles TV series and any other spin­off comics, games, nov­els, or what­ever other assorted ephemera that has since only mud­dled things further:

off­screen:

  • 1959 (T1, T2) or 1965 (T3): Sarah Con­nor born

The Ter­mi­na­tor (1984)

  • The present: 1984 (Los Angeles)
  • Judge­ment Day: August 29, 1997 (spec­i­fied in T2)
  • The future: 2029

off­screen:

  • 1985: John Con­nor born

Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judge­ment Day (1991)

  • The present: 1995 (John Con­nor is 10)
  • Judge­ment Day: August 29, 1997
  • The future: 2029 (same date given in T1, but SkyNet is markedly more advanced)

off­screen:

  • 1997: Sarah Con­nor dies of leukemia (T3)

Ter­mi­na­tor 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

  • The present: 2004
  • Judge­ment Day: July 24, 2004 (delayed from 1997 by events of T2)
  • The future: 2032

Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion (2009)

  • Pre­lude: 2003 (Texas death row, prior to the events of T3)
  • Judge­ment Day: July 24, 2004 (not spec­i­fied; I’m assum­ing it’s the same as pre­dicted in T3)
  • The present: 2018 (the ear­li­est vision of the future seen yet)

So across four films, our heroes suc­ceed in delay­ing the dread Judge­ment Day only once, and never out­right pre­vent it. Per­haps the supremacy of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is inevitable, like Ray Kurzweil’s pre­dic­tions of the com­ing Tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­ity.

Four TerminatorsFour movies, four Ter­mi­na­tors: T-600 (Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion), T-800 (The Ter­mi­na­tor), T-1000 (Ter­mi­na­tor 2), T-X (Ter­mi­na­tor 3)

Per­haps eas­i­est to straighten out is the evo­lu­tion of the vil­lain­ous SkyNet’s foot­sol­dier: the tit­u­lar Ter­mi­na­tor. At the time of Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion, SkyNet has only deployed the crude T-600, basi­cally a tank on legs that could be mis­taken for a human only at a great dis­tance. Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion also shows an inter­me­di­ate stage in SkyNet’s plan to cre­ate “infil­tra­tion units”, cyborgs that can ingra­ti­ate them­selves into human enclaves. The pro­to­type turns out to be not very reli­able — far more human than machine — so SkyNet’s skunkworks are already mass-producing all-machine suc­ces­sor, the T-800. Sarah and Reese suc­cess­fully destroyed one of these in The Ter­mi­na­tor, but frag­ments sur­vived destruc­tion and were (para­dox­i­cally) used to cre­ate SkyNet. So, not only is Judge­ment Day not averted, SkyNet is even more advanced in the ver­sion of 2029 seen in Ter­mi­na­tor 2 than the 2029 we see glimpses of in The Ter­mi­na­tor. Sarah and Reese arguably made things worse, for SkyNet devel­oped the more high-tech liq­uid metal Ter­mi­na­tor model T-1000. The events of T2 delay Judge­ment Day until July 24, 2004. Around 2032, SkyNet devel­oped the even more advanced T-X (a hybridized model uti­liz­ing both an endoskele­ton and a liq­uid metal skin) seen in Ter­mi­na­tor 3: Rise of the Machines. SkyNet also evi­dences an enhanced sense of aes­thet­ics, as the T-X is markedly more sexy.

The adult John Con­nor we see in Ter­mi­na­tor 4 has not yet become the leader of the resis­tance that nearly defeats SkyNet in the future of The Ter­mi­na­tor. So, in Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion, what does he think when he’s pre­sented with a plan to per­ma­nently defeat SkyNet? Does he know the plan is doomed to fail because he knows his future self will still be fight­ing SkyNet in the future? In which case, why bother to help? It might be in his best inter­ests to actively thwart the plan.

Also, how does SkyNet know in 2018 that John Con­nor and Kyle Reese must be assas­si­nated? Nei­ther has yet become a leader. Nei­ther has time travel been invented (yet), so SkyNet can’t know (once again, yet) what these two humans will become, or that SkyNet in the future will try at least three times to kill John before Judge­ment Day.

The easy way out of these ques­tions already exists in the Ter­mi­na­tor canon: accord­ing to the rules of time travel as estab­lished in the Ter­mi­na­tor uni­verse, the time­line is not fixed, and may be altered. This con­ceit only raises more ques­tions: if the plan suc­ceeds, he will never become the leader of the resis­tance. He will never send Kyle Reese back in time to become his father, and he will have never existed to put in motion his plan to save human­ity. If he suc­ceeds, will he be erased from his­tory? If so, why do we not seem him grap­ple with this inter­est­ing exis­ten­tial ques­tion onscreen? Would this not be the entire point of finally revis­it­ing the long-running char­ac­ter of John Con­nor as an adult? It would seem the film­mak­ers are more inter­ested in spe­cial effects spec­ta­cle than char­ac­ter or deeper themes.

Edward Furlong, Christian Bale, Nick Stahl, and Michael Edwards as John Connor in The Terminator moviesThree movies, four John Con­nors: Edward Fur­long (Ter­mi­na­tor 2), Nick Stahl (Ter­mi­na­tor 3), Chris­t­ian Bale (Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion), Michael Edwards (Ter­mi­na­tor 2)

All of which brings me to my biggest philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem with the core of the entire Ter­mi­na­tor con­cept: what makes John Con­nor so impor­tant? Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion is the first install­ment in the story to finally depict him in action as the mature rebel leader SkyNet is so afraid of. But the most influ­en­tial acts of lead­er­ship we see are mere moti­va­tional radio addresses meant to inspire a defeated human­ity to keep fight­ing, a far cry from the mes­sianic mil­i­tary com­man­der that will sup­pos­edly lead human­ity to its sal­va­tion. His sup­posed des­tiny is described by the cyn­i­cal Gen­eral Ash­down (Michael Iron­side) as a reli­gious prophecy. I would have liked to see more doubt on the part of the resis­tance that he’s any­thing spe­cial, at least yet. But instead, he inspires blind loy­alty (except for a colleague’s act of spec­tac­u­lar treach­ery in releas­ing a cyborg mole, whom they have every right to believe is a SkyNet agent). Also, why doesn’t any­body just call him “John” or “Con­nor” or “hey you”? He’s appar­ently so impor­tant that every­one always refers to him by his full name, per­haps so the audi­ence is per­pet­u­ally reminded of his por­ten­tous ini­tials, which rather obvi­ously reflect the character’s cre­ator James Cameron, as well as another mytho­log­i­cal sav­ior of human­ity from two mil­len­nia past.

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Apocalypse Porn: Terminator Salvation

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Terminator Salvation movie poster

 

Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion was released in a year curi­ously rife with apoc­a­lypse porn. The visions of world’s end in the­aters that year var­ied wildly in tone: every­thing from illu­mi­nat­ing art to alarmism to escapism. The com­pe­ti­tion to bum you out included Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which uti­lized the best spe­cial effects tech­nol­ogy money could buy to depict the sys­tem­atic destruc­tion of inter­na­tional land­marks, and John Hillcoat’s The Road (read The Dork Report review), which imag­ined the scat­tered rem­nants of human­ity scrab­bling to sur­vive in a world they may have them­selves dec­i­mated, but long past a point where blame had any mean­ing. Tech­nol­ogy is both destroyer and sal­va­tion in Ter­mi­na­tor and 2012, but largely irrel­e­vant to the strag­glers cling­ing to life in The Road. All of humanity’s inven­tions are gone, and give nei­ther aid nor harm.

For the Ter­mi­na­tor series to be such a long-lasting mass enter­tain­ment is odd, con­sid­er­ing it is set in a des­o­late, post-nuclear-war world ruled by a self-aware arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. It would seem that a dis­trust of tech­nol­ogy and fear of world war is a per­pet­ual moti­va­tion to go to the cin­ema. James Cameron’s orig­i­nal sci­ence fic­tion night­mare is vin­tage 1984, with old-school opti­cal spe­cial effects and stop motion ani­ma­tion that, depend­ing on your point of view, are either quaint or relics of a lost era of hand­made moviemak­ing. But its core con­cept was strong enough to become arche­typal of an entire genre, inspir­ing count­less deriv­a­tive works. The Wachowski Broth­ers stole it out­right for The Matrix, where self-aware com­puter pro­grams turn against the human civ­i­liza­tion that cre­ated them, like the Ter­mi­na­tors before them. The Ter­mi­na­tors stage a mali­cious holo­caust of pure exter­mi­na­tion, but the Matrix pro­grams instead vir­tu­ally enslave the human race while they feed on giant elec­tri­cal bat­ter­ies com­prised of farmed human bod­ies. While the epony­mous Matrix was a weapon of frat­ri­cide, The Ter­mi­na­tors were instead locked in a game of time-travel chess. But in each case, the off­spring of human­ity are afflicted with pro­found Freudian com­plexes: they are fix­ated on con­sum­ing their parents.

Christian Bale and Sam Worthington in Terminator SalvationThat’s so $&#%ing unpro­fes­sional, you $&#%ing cyborg infil­tra­tion unit!

The cast of Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion was more pop­u­lated with famous names than it needed to be. Chris­t­ian Bale is now the fourth actor to play the role of humanity’s sav­ior John Con­nor, and with apolo­gies to Edward Fur­long, Nick Stahl, and Thomas Dekker, the first mar­quee name. One need look no fur­ther to spot the biggest gam­ble this film makes: nobody went to see any of the pre­vi­ous three Ter­mi­na­tor films because they were fas­ci­nated by the good guy. From the very begin­ning, the big draw for audi­ences (and the plum role for any actor look­ing to make a splash) was the vil­lain. The epony­mous cyborg antag­o­nist James Cameron cre­ated quickly became iconic and launched body­builder Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger to Hol­ly­wood star­dom and, even more implau­si­bly, a polit­i­cal career.

Bale is com­ing from an entirely dif­fer­ent place than a ‘roided-up Aus­trian ama­teur thes­pian in 1984. Bale is a capital-S Seri­ous Actor, from the very begin­ning of his career as the child lead in Steven Spielberg’s still under-appreciated Empire of the Sun through to his mod­ern resur­gence in Mary Harron’s con­tro­ver­sial Amer­i­can Psy­cho. Like Brando and Crowe before him, Bale comes across as an angry and humor­less guy — pos­si­bly even unsta­ble — in most of his roles and even his pub­lic per­sona. Indeed, rumors of his ill tem­per were seem­ingly con­firmed by his infa­mous erup­tion on the set of Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion in July 2008.

Terminator SalvationThis is as good a place as any to ask: why do the Ter­mi­na­tor movies refer to these as “endoskele­tons”? Isn’t that redundant?

A pes­simist might even imag­ine Bale’s histri­on­ics part of a pub­lic­ity cam­paign to cre­ate aware­ness and pos­i­tive buzz — not just for a movie that stu­dio exec­u­tives might con­sider an unsure prospect in need of a mar­ket­ing boost, but even to cement his own sexy rep­u­ta­tion as a loose can­non or Hol­ly­wood bad boy. In the end, a hissy fit thrown by a hand­some and over­paid celebrity wasn’t enough to pre­vent minor box office dis­ap­point­ment and tepid reviews, (a mod­est 52% on Meta­critic). At the very least, Bale’s tabloid pres­ence helped most of the celebrity obsessed world become aware that there was a new Ter­mi­na­tor film com­ing out, when pre­vi­ously only Comic-Con attend­ing sci-fi geeks had been pay­ing atten­tion. Per­son­ally, know­ing about Bale’s tantrum before­hand actu­ally took me out of the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing the film on its own mer­its. I was con­tin­u­ously dis­tracted by won­der­ing which par­tic­u­lar scene stressed him out enough to blow his top.

Bale’s prickly per­sona might make him emi­nently suit­able for roles like the dri­ven resis­tance leader John Con­nor, but it makes his range seem quite lim­ited. He employs the exact same set of man­ner­isms he used for Bruce Wayne in Bat­man and The Dark Knight (read The Dork Report review): a hoarse voice, tensed pos­ture, and lowered-head thousand-yard stare. Bale may play the top-billed role in The Dark Knight and Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion, but he is arguably not the real pro­tag­o­nist in either and is over­shad­owed by Two-Face (Aaron Eck­hart), The Joker (Heath Ledger), and Mar­cus Wright (Sam Wor­thing­ton) — both in terms of screen time as well as actorly showi­ness. Per­haps it’s a delib­er­ate choice on Bale’s part to seek out essen­tially sup­port­ing parts in which he allows his char­ac­ter to be sub­or­di­nate to a cast osten­si­bly billed below his name. Fit­tingly, Bale was to earn an Oscar the next year for an actual sup­port­ing role in David O. Russell’s The Fighter, so at least in one case his real-life per­sona com­pleted its redemp­tion arc, if his Ter­mi­na­tor role John Con­nor didn’t.

Moon Bloodgood in Terminator SalvationMoon Blood­good checks behind her for her character’s moti­va­tion. It’s got to be around this waste­land someplace.

I have noth­ing to back this alle­ga­tion up, but I’ve heard rumors that the orig­i­nal script for what became Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion cen­tered around the char­ac­ters of Mar­cus (Wor­thing­ton) and Reese (Anton Yelchin). Wor­thing­ton and Yelchin would have shared the focus, while the char­ac­ter of John Con­nor was rel­e­gated to a cameo appear­ance, but the role was greatly expanded when Chris­t­ian Bale became attached. This rumor could account for the rel­a­tive rich­ness (albeit trun­cated) of the Mar­cus char­ac­ter arc, as com­pared to the one-note Con­nor. It would have served both char­ac­ters bet­ter had the movie focused on just one tor­tured male savior.

Direc­tor McG’s Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion is by no means equal to James Cameron’s two orig­i­nal films, but it’s really not all that ter­ri­ble, and cer­tainly bet­ter than Jonathan Mostow’s Ter­mi­na­tor 3: Rise of the Machines. My the­ory is very sim­ple: it’s too grim. The first three movies all had some degree of humor, but Ter­mi­na­tor Salvation’s trail­ers and TV com­mer­cials made no attempt to tart it up as a good time. By far the high­light for the audi­ence I saw it with was the sud­den appear­ance of a famous T-800 model Ter­mi­na­tor, not entirely suc­cess­fully real­ized by apply­ing a CGI Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger head atop body­builder Roland Kickinger. If a lit­tle less than con­vinc­ing, it at least pro­vided some relief from the oppres­sive apoc­a­lyp­tic despair. Also, a newly recorded voiceover cameo by Linda Hamil­ton was a nice touch for nos­tal­gic fans. The always enter­tain­ingly eccen­tric Helena Bon­ham Carter appears in an sig­nif­i­cant cameo, with Bryce Dal­las Howard in a totally incon­se­quen­tial part that could have gone to a new­comer. Fol­low­ing the estab­lished rules of action flicks (per­haps best exem­pli­fied by Cameron’s Aliens), the cast includes the req­ui­site cute kid, but thank­fully she’s mute.

Bryce Dallas Howard in Terminator SalvationYes, Bryce Dal­las Howard is in this movie, for some rea­son. Still doing penance for The Lady in the Water, perhaps?

I was able to go along with the plot for the most part, but found the reduc­tion and over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion frus­trat­ing. A global war against arti­fi­cially aware machines is con­densed down to a hand-to-hand bat­tle with a sin­gle T-800 on a fac­tory floor — a self-conscious retread of the cli­max of the orig­i­nal film. But per­haps this is a bet­ter dra­matic choice than what Cameron did in Aliens, which exces­sively mul­ti­plied the sin­gle alien threat of Rid­ley Scott’s orig­i­nal, effec­tively dimin­ish­ing the core premise that was appeal­ing in the first place: an almost inde­struc­tible crea­ture dri­ven by pure bio­log­i­cal instinct, not malice.

Another fatal flaw with Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion is a con­sis­tent prob­lem with many char­ac­ters’ com­i­cally blasé reac­tions to extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tions. Connor’s right-hand man Reese res­cues a guy who claims never to have seen a Ter­mi­na­tor before, or even know what year it is. But Reese sim­ply answers his ques­tions, and never won­ders just where the hell this weirdo’s been the past few years. Also, I under­stand Williams (Moon Blood­good) bond­ing with Mar­cus after he res­cues her from gang rape, but she risks the safety of an entire human out­post when she decides to free him. This choice goes beyond under­stand­able impul­sive­ness and into the realm of lunacy.

Also curi­ous is an appar­ent lack of imag­i­na­tion in real­iz­ing futur­is­tic tech­nol­ogy. We’re told the Ter­mi­na­tors com­mu­ni­cate over old-school short­wave, so evi­dently SkyNet hasn’t taken over the satel­lite net­work and blan­keted the planet in Wi-Fi or 3G. Maybe the robots found their recep­tion was as bad as Man­hat­tan AT&T sub­scribers. I won’t go into how the gleam­ingly sleek SkyNet HQ includes fancy touch­screen graph­i­cal user inter­faces designed for humans, or how Con­nor mirac­u­lously wit­nesses a nearby nuclear explo­sion with­out being atom­ized by the shock­wave, or at least going blind or con­tract­ing radi­a­tion sick­ness. Such a thin line between sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief (for the pur­poses of thrills & spills) and sheer stu­pid­ity would bother any viewer with half a brain, whether the other half is cyber­netic or not.

Offi­cial movie site: terminatorsalvation.warnerbros.com

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

 

Based On a True Story: The Acclaim and Notoriety of Mike Daisey

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I agree 99% with the pop­u­lar con­sen­sus regard­ing Mike Daisey: he lied. But the tiny 1% nobody seems to be talk­ing about is both­er­ing the hell out of me: if his now infa­mous mono­logue The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is a work of fic­tion, why can’t we talk about it as a work of fiction?

Until recently, Daisey was forg­ing a rep­u­ta­tion as a pop­u­lar monolo­gist in the tra­di­tion of the late Spald­ing Gray: fus­ing the mechan­ics of auto­bi­og­ra­phy, jour­nal­ism, and the­ater to tell sto­ries with the power to move indi­vid­u­als and sway pop­u­lar opin­ion. That is, he was, before his enor­mously pop­u­lar show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was dra­mat­i­cally revealed to be largely com­prised of half-truths and fab­ri­ca­tions. Daisey ini­tially required the­aters to adver­tise it as “a work of non-fiction”. When he began to feel the heat, he ini­tially claimed he had merely taken dra­matic license, but finally issued an actual apol­ogy.

The imbroglio has been Tweeted, blogged, pod­casted, and ana­lyzed to death over the past two weeks, but here are the key inci­dents: Daisey’s orig­i­nal stage mono­logue (with a free tran­script on his web­site), an episode of the ven­er­a­ble radio pro­gram This Amer­i­can Life fea­tur­ing a ver­sion of it, fol­lowed by their aston­ish­ingly grip­ping retrac­tion. My favorite analy­ses of the ensu­ing fall­out came from Dar­ing Fire­ball (Sep­a­rat­ing the Baby From the Bath Water) and Derek Powazek (How to Spot a Liar).

The gen­eral con­sen­sus among the cognoscenti, digerati and NPR set alike, is that Daisey made a fatal error in pre­sent­ing his piece as jour­nal­is­tic report. I agree. But most of these ana­lysts go on to express hor­ror and out­rage that Daisey’s show goes on. The mono­logue inspired a pop­u­lar peti­tion on Change.org (now there’s a peti­tion against the peti­tion). The­aters are not can­cel­ing Daisey’s future shows and are refus­ing refunds for past show­ings. Gru­ber, in an episode of his pod­cast The Talk Show, attrib­utes this to the the­ater busi­ness run­ning on a tight mar­gin, as if it were sim­ply a mat­ter of eco­nom­ics. Inter­est­ingly, The Under­state­ment reports that many the­aters are also dar­ing to defend the “essen­tial truth” of Daisey’s work.

Mike DaiseyMike Daisey went to great lengths to pre­serve the fic­tion that “The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs” was non­fic­tion (photo credit: mikedaisey.blogspot.com)

Which brings me to the tiny sliver of this whole story that I believe needs to be addressed: there is a mas­sive dis­con­nect between jour­nal­ists and, for lack of a sin­gle term, artists/writers/performers/monologists/etc. So Mike Daisey largely lied about what he saw in China; so what? Should his admit­tedly pow­er­ful mono­logue be wiped from the record? Can we not talk about it as a work of lit­er­a­ture? Here is the point where, per­haps, the Eng­lish majors of the world ought to take over from the journalists.

Ira Glass states in the This Amer­i­can Life retrac­tion that Daisey’s use of the lit­er­ary device of speak­ing in the first per­son trig­gered his brain to reg­is­ter it as truth. Other out­raged jour­nal­ists seem to not want to even enter­tain the idea that Daisey’s work might be an effec­tive work of fic­tion on its own terms. Daisey was free to present his first-person account as truth (or as Stephen Col­bert might term it, “truthy”) within the con­text of his play itself, but he erred by also doing so on This Amer­i­can Life, Real Time With Bill Maher, CBS News, and other news venues. He deceived accred­ited jour­nal­ists with hard-earned rep­u­ta­tions in order to pre­serve the fic­tion that his piece was nonfiction.

But what if he hadn’t? What if he had, from the begin­ning, pitched The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs as what it actu­ally is: a fic­tion­al­ized dra­matic account, told in the first per­son but, to use a famil­iar phrase, based on a true story. Most of what Daisey claims he per­son­ally wit­nessed are actual ongo­ing events at Fox­conn and other fac­to­ries in China. Work­ers’ con­di­tions are harsh and unjust, not only to west­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties, but also in vio­la­tion of Chi­nese reg­u­la­tions. Many com­menters have mused on how Apple Inc. may have been harmed by Daisey, both finan­cially and in terms of rep­u­ta­tion. It most likely has to some mea­sur­able degree, but no mat­ter how much I may per­son­ally use and like many of their prod­ucts, I don’t believe Apple is any more pos­sessed of sen­si­tive feel­ings than any other multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tion. Apple is no more deserv­ing of pro­tec­tion from a work of fic­tion than — to fab­ri­cate a hypo­thet­i­cal exam­ple — Exxon might be if a writer were to pub­lish a novel telling the story of an envi­ron­men­tal activist vis­it­ing the 1989 Valdez spill.

The cur­rent refusal to con­sider that Daisey’s dis­cred­ited work might still have merit as a piece of lit­er­a­ture smacks to me of two things:

  1. Exces­sive apolo­gia to Apple. Apple is justly beloved for design­ing great prod­ucts and seems to be mak­ing a great effort to improve its envi­ron­men­tal impact and sup­plier respon­si­bil­ity. But no one needs to worry about their feel­ings being hurt.
  2. A gen­eral dis­trust and fear of fic­tion and lit­er­a­ture. On a grand scale, you often see this when video games are blamed for school vio­lence, rock lyrics for drug use, or comic books for juve­nile delin­quency. When a prob­lem is too big to deal with, often the eas­i­est thing to do is ban or burn a book. Now, of course those are extreme cases, and all that’s hap­pen­ing here is a few jour­nal­ists dis­cred­it­ing one man’s dra­matic mono­logue. Per­haps jour­nal­ists spend too much of their careers deal­ing with ver­i­fi­able facts, and are ill-equipped to deal with the some­times messy busi­ness of ana­lyz­ing literature.

Daisey is not a jour­nal­ist, and his sit­u­a­tion right now is not the same as that of Jayson Blair, who was rightly run out of town for his numer­ous fab­ri­ca­tions pub­lished by the New York Times up until being dis­cov­ered as a fraud in 2003. He’s more akin to James Frey, whose sup­posed mem­oir A Mil­lion Lit­tle Pieces was revealed in 2006 to have been bet­ter clas­si­fied as a novel. Had it not been mar­keted as his true life’s story, it prob­a­bly would have been lost in the fray of book­stores’ crowded fic­tion aisles. Daisey’s medium is the the­ater, worlds away from the media jour­nal­ists work in. No the­ater­goer or novel reader expects absolute ver­i­fi­able truth from lit­er­a­ture. The tools of lit­er­a­ture have the power to enter­tain, instill a sense of cathar­sis in the audi­ence, to illu­mi­nate, and per­haps even to move peo­ple to action. All of these goals seem to have moti­vated Daisey to do what he did.

It’s now near-impossible to appraise the merit of Daisey’s work on its own terms. Inter­viewed by Ira Glass in the This Amer­i­can Life episode Retrac­tion, he stated that The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is the “best thing I’ve done.” Clearly, he knew he had really hit on some­thing that touched a nerve in his audi­ences, and it brought him a great deal of acclaim that later cur­dled into noto­ri­ety. He wrongly felt that the notion his work was fac­tu­ally true was essen­tial to its con­tin­u­ing pop­u­lar­ity, which pro­vided him many ben­e­fits: larger audi­ences, fame, and likely a greater income than the vast major­ity of strug­gling the­ater artists are ever likely to glean from their work. I think it’s clear now that had he pre­sented his work as fic­tion, it would have reached far fewer peo­ple, but still have had its unde­ni­able impact on those that did expe­ri­ence it. The shame is that now we’ll never know.

The sil­ver lin­ing is he con­tributed to an ever increas­ing spot­light on the com­plex issue of China’s labor prac­tices, and a grow­ing aware­ness that the con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­try could not exist as we know it today with­out it.

Relentless Withholding: Michael Mann’s Public Enemies

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Public Enemies movie poster

 

Khoi Vinh rightly observes in Min­i­mal­ism, Michael Mann and Miami Vice that “Mann has pro­duced a taut, styl­is­tic and often bru­tally imper­sonal fil­mog­ra­phy that seems most inter­ested in the con­cept of work” (via Dar­ing Fire­ball). I wholly under­stand and laud the aim of a min­i­mal­ist, “relent­lessly with­hold­ing” nar­ra­tive, but I don’t believe it’s igno­rant or pop­ulist to demand more. Mann has proved again and again to be a mas­ter at man­ag­ing both char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and cold hard plot, par­tic­u­larly in his mas­ter­piece Heat. So to my eyes, Pub­lic Ene­mies marks a regres­sion. The dan­ger in per­pet­u­at­ing multi-million dol­lar movies with­out an inter­est in human beings is entire mul­ti­plexes full of soul­less spe­cial effects show­cases like Trans­form­ers. Vinh goes on to appre­ci­ate Mann’s con­struc­tion of the film as a form of design, not least because Mann com­mis­sioned Neville Brody to design a type­face New Deal, and the whole arti­cle is a must read.

The curse of avidly fol­low­ing any par­tic­u­lar artist is that one is set up for dis­pro­por­tion­ate dis­ap­point­ment when­ever their lat­est work doesn’t mea­sure up to their very best. Mann is one of my own per­sonal favorite film­mak­ers, and for the record, I would cite Thief, Heat, The Insider, and Col­lat­eral as his best and some of my favorite movies over­all. As for the rest: Man­hunter suf­fers from the usual crit­i­cisms levied against Mann (dated, styl­ized, and over­se­ri­ous). The Last of the Mohi­cans is over­rated (famous mostly for its catchy score and cap­tur­ing Daniel Day Lewis on film at his most hunky). Ali was a rel­a­tively con­ven­tional biopic. And finally, I was down­right shocked by how gar­ish, empty, and, well, just how bad Miami Vice was (on first view­ing, at least).

Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's Public EnemiesJohnny Depp as John Dillinger: “We’re hav­ing too good a time today. We ain’t think­ing about tomorrow.”

Atyp­i­cally for the genre, all three of Mann’s biopics are focused on a lim­ited time­frame. The Insider, Ali, and Pub­lic Ene­mies all exam­ine famous fig­ures as adults, dur­ing the most active and famous por­tions of their lives. Pub­lic Ene­mies can’t help but be ham­strung by the rules of non­fic­tion, which is by def­i­n­i­tion less dra­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing than fic­tion. Fic­tion is care­fully crafted by an author, and non­fic­tion is messy seri­ous of events that won’t slot into Aristotle’s Poet­ics, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thou­sand Faces, or Robert McKee’s screen­writ­ing for­mu­lae that we as a cul­ture find cathar­tic in art almost by detault. Ali is also a casu­alty of this equa­tion; it’s a biog­ra­phy, not a nar­ra­tive. That doesn’t explain the bril­liance of The Insider, which I con­sider a tri­umph. Per­haps it’s because its sub­ject Jef­frey Wigand is not in the same league of fame as Muham­mad Ali or John Dillinger, allow­ing the audi­ence to dis­cover more than they may already know. I would argue that The Insider is actu­ally about some­thing big­ger than the life story of one man; it ques­tions whether integrity, purity, and hon­esty have a place in a mod­ern world run by corporations.

Before I enu­mer­ate my com­plaints about Pub­lic Ene­mies, it must be said that it’s wholly engross­ing. Mann’s cus­tom­ar­ily deep research results in a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally high level of verisimil­i­tude through­out. Many sequences were shot in the actual his­toric loca­tions, includ­ing a raid on a safe house at Lit­tle Bohemia Lodge in Man­i­tow­ish Waters, Wis­con­sin, a jail­break from Lake County jail in Crown Point, Indi­ana, and Dillinger’s death at the Bio­graph The­ater in Chicago. The action is vis­ceral and the sus­pense is nail-biting, espe­cially a sequence in which John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) brazenly strolls through the Spe­cial Crimes Unit offices the day before he is to die. One might assume this aston­ish­ing event to be a fab­ri­ca­tion for dra­matic pur­poses, but Roger Ebert says it’s “based on fact”).

Any fol­lower of Mann’s work will be unsur­prised to see that Pub­lic Ene­mies is visu­ally beau­ti­ful. Cin­e­matog­ra­pher Dante Spin­otti pre­vi­ously shot Man­hunter, Last of the Mohi­cans, Heat, and The Insider on film — how quaint! — but here turns to dig­i­tal video, with which Mann and Dion Beebe exper­i­mented on Col­lat­eral and Miami Vice. The scenes set in a dimly-lit F.B.I. tele­phone sur­veil­lance office look par­tic­u­larly strik­ing on dig­i­tal video. Stan­ley Kubrick sought nat­ural light so dearly that he famously helped develop spe­cial lenses capa­ble of shoot­ing by can­dle­light for Barry Lyn­don, so one sus­pects he would have loved the tech­nol­ogy now available.

Ter­ri­fy­ing, pet­ri­fy­ing gun­fights have been a trade­mark of Mann’s since his ear­li­est fea­ture The Keep. He has per­fected it by Pub­lic Ene­mies, in which the tight chore­og­ra­phy and extreme vio­lence is matched only by the con­cus­sive sound design. These sequences hark back to the inno­v­a­tive urban fire­fight in Heat, when to the film­mak­ers’ happy sur­prise, the actual pro­duc­tion sound proved more ear­split­ting than was pos­si­ble with post-production foley effects. When I saw Pub­lic Ene­mies in the the­ater, the first reel was marred by ter­ri­ble sound (an improve­ment over my first view­ing of Miami Vice, which was almost inaudi­ble through­out). Once resolved, the vol­ume was loud enough to almost phys­i­cally feel the force of bul­lets splin­ter­ing walls, tree trunks, and back­ground per­form­ers. Mann used to reserve his epic gun bat­tles for cli­maxes, such as when Frank (James Caan) raids the mobster’s house in Thief, and Gra­ham (William Peter­son) single-handedly attacks The Tooth Fairy’s (Tom Noo­nan) lair in Man­hunter. The shootouts grew to mas­sive scale and epic lengths in the later films, like the unnerv­ing night­club raid in Col­lat­eral, and espe­cially the cat­a­clysmic down­town LA shootout that occurs roughly in the mid­dle of Heat, which the film remorse­lessly builds towards and then thor­oughly explores the ramifications.

Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard in Michael Mann's Public EnemiesJohnny Depp and Mar­ion Cotil­lard in Pub­lic Ene­mies: “I was raised on a farm in Moooresville, Indi­ana. My mama ran out on us when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn’t know no bet­ter way to raise me. I like base­ball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you… what else you need to know?”

In con­trast, much of Pub­lic Ene­mies is a long, sus­tained chase — a struc­tural con­ceit Mann seems to have been embrac­ing ever since Col­lat­eral. As Fer­nando F. Croce observed on The Auteurs, “Mann has grad­u­ally shifted from an image-based artist to a movement-based artist. Make that a sensation-based artist” … “Mann’s char­ac­ters are dream­ers pos­ing as tough guys.” Mann punc­tu­ates the con­stant for­ward motion of the plot with action set pieces includ­ing at least two jail breaks, sev­eral bank rob­beries, and a chaotic raid on a safe house. Both jail breaks are clever, in which the auda­cious Dillinger largely exer­cises brains over brawn, and designs each at least partly to humil­i­ate the law­men. In the first, Dillinger gets him­self delib­er­ately locked up in order to bust his asso­ciates out. In the sec­ond, they make their get­away in the sheriff’s own car.

Dillinger died in 1934, mark­ing the twi­light of the clas­sic gang­ster era in more ways than one. His activ­i­ties insti­gated the cre­ation of the F.B.I. and the pass­ing of laws that inhib­ited crim­i­nal enter­prise, mak­ing him very unpop­u­lar with the orga­nized crime fam­i­lies that were hap­pily oper­at­ing with rel­a­tive free­dom before he started show­boat­ing and stir­ring things up. His crim­i­nal career coin­cided squarely with the Great Depres­sion era. Mann refrains from show­ing the stereo­typ­i­cal Hoover­towns or des­ic­cated farm­steads directly, but the largely unspo­ken eco­nomic strife hangs over every­one nev­er­the­less. One of the rea­sons Dillinger became such a folk hero is that he care­fully cul­ti­vated a Robin Hood per­sona by very delib­er­ately tak­ing care not to rob indi­vid­u­als, but to steal from banks and, by proxy, the vil­i­fied fed­eral government.

Con­tem­po­rary media hype made Dillinger a celebrity, and ulti­mately one of the last roman­ti­cized crim­i­nals to be able to hide out in pub­lic. Mann depicts this idol­iza­tion sub­tly. For instance, when the gang refreshes them­selves at a farm­house after break­ing out of jail, the woman of the house qui­etly begs Dillinger to “take me with you.” Note she spec­i­fies “me,” despite hav­ing chil­dren in tow. Most peo­ple still know his name today, despite him lack­ing a mem­o­rable nick­name like his peers Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nel­son. Inci­den­tally, Baby Face por­trayed in Pub­lic Ene­mies by actor Stephen Gra­ham as dan­ger­ously unhinged and mur­der­ous. He has the crim­i­nal mind, but unlike Dillinger lacks the dis­ci­pline to make it work for him. The dynamic is sim­i­lar that that of Neil vs. his way­ward hench­man Wain­grow in Heat. Dillinger can’t do what he does alone, but any asso­ci­a­tion with a man like Baby Face courts disaster.

In Knives Out for Michael Mann, Kim Mas­ters dishes the lat­est dirt on Mann (via In Con­tention). Anony­mous gos­sip has him as one of the most dif­fi­cult and even irre­spon­si­ble direc­tors work­ing today, and stu­dios may no longer wish to front his high price tag for movies that aren’t prof­itable. I usu­ally protest when I hear stu­dio exec­u­tives com­plain­ing about “dif­fi­cult” film­mak­ers — of course film­mak­ers are dif­fi­cult — they’re the artists and stu­dio exec­u­tives are busi­ness­peo­ple. With­out dif­fi­cult artists, the accoun­tants and MBAs that run the movie indus­try would have no “prod­uct” to sell. I usu­ally dis­miss the com­ments of exec­u­tives that get paid more than the artists they sup­pos­edly enable to express them­selves. But if the rumors about Mann are true, he’s more than just dif­fi­cult. In the case of Miami Vice, he report­edly dis­re­garded the safety of his crews by film­ing in the Gulf Coast as Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina bore down — fol­lowed by an actual gun fight on the set. Con­di­tions were so bad on the set of Pub­lic Ene­mies that Depp report­edly stopped speak­ing with Mann.

Marion Cotillard in Michael Mann's Public EnemiesMar­ion Cotil­lard as Bil­lie: “They’re look­ing at me because they’re not used to hav­ing a girl in their restau­rant in a $3 dress.”

Accord­ing to Scott Shoger’s Hol­ly­wood Goes Gang­ster, Dillinger was a movie buff, and was even semi-seriously plan­ning a movie about him­self not long before his death (an intrigu­ing fact we don’t see in Pub­lic Ene­mies). The last movie he saw was Man­hat­tan Melo­drama, for which Clark Gable he won an Oscar. Being Dillinger’s last movie ticket gave the film an unde­ni­able mar­ket­ing boost. Mann shows Dillinger in a state of reverie as he watches key excerpts that had some per­sonal rel­e­vance to how he saw him­self. Shoger also states post-Hays Code Hol­ly­wood had an unwrit­ten agree­ment to not pro­duce explicit biopics of actual gang­sters, lest they con­tribute to their celebrity and glo­rify the crim­i­nal lifestyle. This self-censorship more or less held until Arthur Penn’s Bon­nie & Clyde (1967). As such, only a few movies have told John Dillinger’s story, includ­ing The FBI Story (1959, with Jimmy Stew­art), The Lady in Red (1979), and at least two sim­ply called Dillinger (1973 and 1991).

In think­ing about Pub­lic Ene­mies, I can’t help but keep going back to Thief and Heat, and it doesn’t sur­vive the com­par­i­son. Maybe the real John Dillinger just isn’t as inter­est­ing as two of Mann’s pre­vi­ous fic­tional thieves (or in Mann’s par­lance, “guys that pull down scores”): Neil (Robert De Niro) in Heat and Frank (James Caan) in Thief. Pub­lic Ene­mies is all sur­face, with­out the rich char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Thief and Heat. Pub­lic Ene­mies left me grasp­ing at the tini­est of frag­ments in search of depth or sub­text: a lit­tle look by an actor, a telling line of dia­logue, any­thing. But there isn’t much there. Roger Ebert appre­ci­ates the refresh­ing lack of back­story con­ven­tional in both the biopic and gang­ster gen­res. I agree with him in prin­ci­ple, but would like to point out that nei­ther Thief nor Heat fea­tures back­story — both flesh out its char­ac­ters with what you might call “now-story.”

While Pub­lic Ene­mies often feels trag­i­cally lack­ing in dra­matic inter­est, vir­tu­ally every sin­gle char­ac­ter in Heat has a back­story, even the get­away dri­ver Don­ald (Den­nis Hays­bert) that dies before the car goes one block. Here, we don’t learn any­thing about any­body. Aside from Dillinger him­self, the one char­ac­ter we prob­a­bly needed to learn the most about is Melvin Purvis (Chris­t­ian Bale). Purvis is a cold fish out­wardly, such as when we dis­pas­sion­ately guns down Pretty Boy Floyd (Chan­ning Tatum) after giv­ing him one last chance to sur­ren­der. We can infer that he’s a cold, steely G-Man with a par­tic­u­lar exper­tise in sharp­shoot­ing. Bale’s per­for­mance con­veys sad­ness and guilt over what he’s doing — the ques­tion­able moral­ity of defeat­ing gang­sters with tor­ture and often even out­right sum­mary exe­cu­tion. Heat’s cops and rob­bers are both fas­ci­nat­ing, but who cares about Purvis’ safety, or if he achieves his aims? The only scene in which Bale and Depp share the screen marks one of the few sparks of life in the entire movie, but it’s frus­trat­ingly brief and unfor­tu­nately visu­al­ized through the old cliché of char­ac­ters speak­ing through bars. The old Mann would have turned it into a sev­eral minute long con­ver­sa­tion, a cen­ter­piece of the film.

Another frus­trat­ing cypher is the man Purvis drafts as as con­tro­ver­sial expert on Dillinger. Charles Win­stead (Stephen Lang), was an actual his­toric Texas Ranger, but unless I missed some­thing, the movie doesn’t iden­tify him at all, and in fact sug­gests that he’s from the wrong side of the law, being that he’s so famil­iar with orga­nized crime and the arche­typal gang­ster mind­set. We learn noth­ing of him aside from the fact that he’s clever and sus­pi­ciously insight­ful at pre­dict­ing Dillinger’s behav­ior. He’s a bit sin­is­ter, and rough and street­wise in man­ner and dress, so per­haps the point is just that he’s not the type that J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) would con­sider good G-Man mate­r­ial: young, clean cut, col­lege edu­cated sorts like Hoover’s man-crush Purvis.

Christian Bale and Billy Crudup in Michael Mann's Public EnemiesJ. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) recruits Melvin Purvis (Chris­t­ian Bale) for “A mod­ern force of pro­fes­sional young men of the best sort.”

What do we learn of the main man him­self? Dillinger was a self-created celebrity ahead of his time: media-savvy and always ready to pro­duce a good, con­cise catch­phrase at the drop of a hat. The most telling rev­e­la­tion about his char­ac­ter comes from a dying col­league John “Red” Hamil­ton (Jason Clarke), who, in his dying moments, chooses to arm­chair psy­cho­an­a­lyze his part­ner in crime, say­ing he’s unable to let any­one down. Really? When did the film illus­trate this aspect of his char­ac­ter? All we can infer from his onscreen behav­ior is that he’s loyal to the woman he loves (although not so loyal that he doesn’t later go out on a date with a hooker while his girl­friend is in prison — although to psy­cho­an­a­lyze him our­selves, this action is prob­a­bly a not-very-subconscious deci­sion to allow him­self to get caught, AKA “sui­cide by cop”). Just as he was able to casu­ally stroll through his to-be cap­tors’ offices with­out being caught, Dillinger is a ghost that goes through life with­out mak­ing any kind of impact. Neil in Heat may have had no friends, fam­ily, or even fur­ni­ture, but he had a code: “Don’t let your­self get attached to any­thing you are not will­ing to walk out on in 30 sec­onds flat if you feel the heat around the cor­ner.” Like Neil in Heat and Frank in Thief, Dillinger doesn’t have an exit strat­egy from his lifestyle until he meets a woman. Neil found love and wanted to pull a final score and then dis­ap­pear for­ever. Dillinger wants the girl and an ongo­ing crime spree. Only when she is taken from him does he con­sider a final score to retire on.

A sur­pris­ing num­ber of name actors appear in tiny roles, includ­ing David Wen­ham, Lily Tay­lor, Leelee Sobieski, Stephen Dorff, Emi­lie de Ravin (from the TV series Lost) and even singer Diana Krall in a cameo. One pos­si­ble expla­na­tion is that they sim­ply wanted to work for Mann in any capac­ity. Or maybe their roles were larger before the edit­ing process. One in par­tic­u­lar that stands out is Gio­vanni Ribisi as Alvin Karpis, a high level fixer and orga­nizer, sort of like the skeezy but coldly pro­fes­sional Nate (John Voight) in Heat.

Mann often catches a lot of flak for his typ­i­cal paucity of female char­ac­ters, but also for the few he does fea­ture being rather prob­lem­atic. It’s obvi­ous that Mann is inter­ested in sto­ries about men (gang­sters, cops, thieves, etc.). In my opin­ion, it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily make him a misog­y­nist if his sto­ries don’t always fea­ture full, richly drawn female char­ac­ters. But curi­ously, Bil­lie in Pub­lic Ene­mies may not be one of Mann’s most inter­est­ing female char­ac­ters across his body of work, but she is more com­plexly drawn than any of the male char­ac­ters in Pub­lic Ene­mies. We learn a lit­tle about her, cer­tainly more than we do about any­one else, but I still don’t get why she would drop every­thing and run off with a gang­ster. Bil­lie remains in love with Dillinger and faith­ful to him even when tor­tured and sen­tenced to a two-year jail term. True, she’s a young woman trapped in a dead-end job and the sub­ject of racism (she’s part Native Amer­i­can). A good con­trast is the char­ac­ter of Eady (Amy Bren­ne­man) in Heat, whose com­plex rela­tion­ship with the crim­i­nal Neil I found not only plau­si­ble but sadly mov­ing. Cotil­lard is fine, but I think Brenneman’s touch­ing per­for­mance as a crush­ingly lonely woman vul­ner­a­ble to a charis­matic but con­trol­ling older man really helped me under­stand her desire to run away. Both Eady and Bil­lie are will­ing to aban­don their lives, such as they are, or even impli­cate them­selves for a man that could be arrested or killed at any moment.

Must read: Neville Brody’s fave film fonts and open­ing sequences, from The Guardian

Offi­cial movie site: www.publicenemies.net

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Which Way Is Up: Michael Mann’s Miami Vice

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Miami Vice movie poster

 

The sim­ple truth is that I hated Michael Mann’s Miami Vice on first view­ing. On a tech­ni­cal level, it was marred by hideously poor sound repro­duc­tion — for which I blamed the par­tic­u­lar the­ater I hap­pened to see it in, but a friend of mine had the same com­plaint about a totally dif­fer­ent venue, sug­gest­ing some­thing was wrong with the prints them­selves. I found the film much improved when watch­ing the unrated director’s cut avail­able on DVD and Blu-ray — not just sport­ing more audi­ble sound but even improved flu­id­ity in the sto­ry­telling. I don’t recall the orig­i­nal the­atri­cal cut well enough to iden­tify what may have been added, altered, extended, or rearranged, so any num­ber of fac­tors could have con­tributed to a more for­giv­ing reap­praisal: approx­i­mately five extra min­utes of breath­ing room, bet­ter sound, and an orig­i­nal opin­ion so low there there was no way to go but up.

The film is based on the orig­i­nal tele­vi­sion series of the same name that ran between 1984–1989, cre­ated by Anthony Yerkovich and pro­duced by Mann. Its premise was famously encap­su­lated by Mann’s alleged two-word pitch “MTV cops” — a leg­end that may or may not be true but has the ben­e­fit of being right on-the-nose. Kitschy even at the time, Miami Vice drew its styl­is­tic ten­den­cies — and some­times even its guest stars — from MTV. It’s a world apart from Crime Story, another Mann crime drama and an early exper­i­ment with seri­al­ized sto­ry­telling that wouldn’t really take hold until much later with Twin Peaks and The Sopra­nos. It ran con­cur­rently with Miami Vice but was can­celled after only two two sea­sons (1986–87).

Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx in Michael Mann's Miami ViceOK, you win. Your suit is shinier than mine.

Miami Vice the movie, how­ever, is the prod­uct of Mann the writer and direc­tor as opposed to episodic tele­vi­sion pro­ducer and showrun­ner. The film is more of auteur work than the col­lab­o­ra­tive medium of a tele­vi­sion series, and as such begs com­par­i­son with his other major films also set in the world of crime and pun­ish­ment: Man­hunter, Thief, Heat, Col­lat­eral, and Pub­lic Ene­mies. But whereas most of these pre­sented sym­pa­thetic (or at least com­plex) por­traits of crim­i­nals, Miami Vice is a more tra­di­tional policier firmly on the side of the good guys.

Miami Vice fol­lows the high-stakes exploits of Sonny Crock­ett (Colin Far­rell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), two Miami-Dade Police detec­tives in the war on drugs. The story begins in medias res, plung­ing the audi­ence into an under­cover oper­a­tion that goes awry, fol­lowed by an effort to assist a col­league whose cover was blown while embed­ded in a Columbian drug run­ning oper­a­tion. This sec­ond oper­a­tion is just the tip of an ice­berg: FBI Agent John Fujima (Cia­rán Hinds) reveals that there is a mole in the FBI. Crock­ett and Tubbs are dep­u­tized as fed­eral agents for pur­poses of con­tin­u­ing the investigation.

Like typ­i­cal Mann pro­tag­o­nists, the detec­tives’ jobs are the sole focus of their lives. In the DVD bonus fea­tures, a real under­cover oper­a­tive states how dis­con­cert­ing it is to lead another life as a high roller, wear­ing the finest clothes and dri­ving the best cars, but return home off duty to his fam­ily in a crappy used car. It would have been nice to see what kind of lives Crock­ett and Tubbs lead off duty, if any, and learn a lit­tle of what life is really like for under­cover cops. Instead, we watch the entire onscreen team live, eat, and sleep together in a large unfur­nished house, much like mas­ter thief Neil McCauley’s (Robert De Niro) spar­tan abode in Heat.

Colin Farrell and Gong Li in Michael Mann's Miami ViceCrock­ett trav­els in style.

Both men become pro­fes­sion­ally com­pro­mised by their rela­tion­ships with women, esca­lat­ing to the point where their lives are threat­ened by their emo­tional needs. Nei­ther looks out­side their nar­row work sphere for love: Tubbs is roman­ti­cally involved with a col­league, and Crock­ett becomes mixed up with gor­geous money laun­dress Isabella (Gong Li). She’s dis­pas­sion­ate and inscrutable when we see her at work, but reveals worlds of emo­tion behind her eyes when alone with Crock­ett. Frankly, Gong Li is a lit­tle hard to under­stand, her char­ac­ter being a Chi­nese immi­grant to Havana, requir­ing her to speak two lan­guages in a film already rife with a plethora of blended accents. Justly wary of his partner’s infat­u­a­tion, Tubbs warns him, “There’s under­cover and then there’s which way is up.” Ignor­ing his partner’s advice, Crock­ett abets her escape from the fed­eral sting oper­a­tion, an act the movie judges as morally accept­able because he loves her.

Return­ing play­ers from the Mann reper­tory include Domenick Lom­bar­dozzi (from Pub­lic Ene­mies) and Barry Shabaka Hen­ley (the ill-fated jazz club owner in Col­lat­eral, who also appears as a parole agent in Mann’s lat­est TV project Luck). New addi­tions include Eddie Marsan, per­haps one of the most ver­sa­tile actors in the world, as a gov­ern­ment infor­mant with a thor­oughly con­vinc­ing South­ern twang, and John Ortiz (also a lead in Luck, and don’t miss him oppo­site Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man and Amy Ryan in Jack Goes Boat­ing). His vil­lain­ous char­ac­ter here at first seems on a par with Javier Bardem’s pow­er­ful and threat­en­ing turn in Col­lat­eral, more savvy and per­cep­tive even than his boss Arcan­gel de Jesus Mon­toya (Luis Tosar). But he ulti­mately proves pathetic and weaselly — the audience’s abil­ity to take him seri­ously not helped by a car­i­ca­tured accent just this side of Speedy Gonzales.

Mann took the oppor­tu­nity to con­tinue his exper­i­ments with dig­i­tal cin­e­matog­ra­phy begun in Col­lat­eral, and many of the loca­tions were actual. Nev­er­the­less, the pro­duc­tion was enor­mously expen­sive for a movie with­out sig­nif­i­cant CGI spe­cial effects, even though it was ulti­mately prof­itable world­wide. A sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the expense is likely attrib­ut­able to Mann’s cus­tom­ar­ily deep research in the ser­vice of verisimil­i­tude, right down to unusual speed­boats and implau­si­bly exotic (but real) types of weapons.

Gong Li and Colin Farrell in Michael Mann's Miami ViceCrock­ett (Colin Far­rell) leans in to bet­ter under­stand Isabella’s (Gong Li) accent

In “Knives Out for Michael Mann”, Kim Mas­ters dishes the lat­est dirt on Mann, run­ning a parade of anony­mous, damn­ing onset anec­dotes. In par­tic­u­lar, he was sup­pos­edly incon­sid­er­ate of the safety of the cast and crew dur­ing a shoot already made phys­i­cally dan­ger­ous by every­thing from Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina to loca­tions in gang-controlled ter­ri­tory. Mann may not be solely to blame, how­ever, for Slate fin­gers actor Jamie Foxx for demand­ing higher billing and a raise after win­ning the Best Actor Oscar for the Ray Charles biopic Ray. He also allegedly demanded a last-minute rewrite that com­pro­mised the end­ing, and refused to fly to loca­tion shoots. The lat­ter, at least, may be excus­able — for The Daily Beast attrib­utes his reasonable-sounding objec­tion to an on-set actual shoot­ing incident.

The score is rather dis­ap­point­ing for a Mann film, espe­cially com­pared to the great Dead Can Dance neo-medieval sound­scapes for The Insider, the Kro­nos Quar­tet dis­so­nance in Heat, and James New­ton Howard’s Mogwai-inspired post-rock score for Col­lat­eral. Jan Hammer’s iconic theme for the TV series is inex­plic­a­bly absent, but there is a truly awful cover by the band Non­point of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”, a sig­na­ture song of the orig­i­nal show.

Another car­ry­over from the province of the orig­i­nal series is the unfor­tu­nate fash­ion vic­tims. The 21st cen­tury Crock­ett and Tubbs are seem­ingly locked in com­pe­ti­tion to see who owns the shini­est suit or the sil­li­est hair­style (Crock­ett rocks a mul­let and Tubbs a precision-chiselled hair­line). One is seen to drive a rocket-propelled euro­pean sports­car, which is appar­ently not meant to be a humor­ous allu­sion to the Adam West’s 1960s Batmobile.

The film ends with a mun­dane final shot, very unchar­ac­ter­is­tic for the direc­tor that ended Thief and Heat with mag­nif­i­cent tableaus. Crock­ett enters a hos­pi­tal, cut to cred­its. I get the point: he believes love is impos­si­ble for a man in his posi­tion — he effec­tively impris­ons his girl­friend in another kind of deep cover, all in favor of him going back to work, at his partner’s side as they check up on an injured col­league. It’s true to char­ac­ter, and the­mat­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant, but visu­ally anti­cli­mac­tic and not what we pay for when we go to see a film from such a famously exact­ing and styl­is­tic filmmaker.

Offi­cial movie site: www.miamivice.com

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People Are Vectors: George A. Romero’s The Crazies

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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle

The Crazies movie poster

 

George A. Romero prac­ti­cally invented the lucra­tive zom­bie sub­genre with Night of the Liv­ing Dead in 1968, simul­ta­ne­ously trap­ping him­self within it for most of his sub­se­quent career. Romero’s zom­bies served him well enough for six films and count­ing, at least two of which tran­scended the genre and are still dis­cussed in seri­ous terms. His less famous later cre­ations the “cra­zies” only appeared in one of his films, but their influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to their fame. They are arguably the­mat­i­cally richer and — despite not tech­ni­cally being zom­bies, per se — exert a greater influ­ence on most sig­nif­i­cant sub­se­quent zom­bie films by other directors.

The Cra­zies (1973) may not belong to Romero’s offi­cial Liv­ing Dead cycle, but what sets it apart is mostly a mat­ter of brand­ing. Zom­bies had cap­tured the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion in a way that the more vaguely-defined cra­zies could not, at least at first. The clas­si­cal Romero-style zom­bie is sim­ply a rean­i­mated corpse with an insa­tiable ani­mal hunger in place of higher brain func­tion — in effect a sub­trac­tion of the intan­gi­ble human essence, or what a reli­gious per­son would describe as a soul. In con­trast, a crazy is exactly what it sounds like: a liv­ing per­son dri­ven to unchecked vio­lence and lust, while still remain­ing rec­og­niz­ably human.

A scene from George A. Romero's The Crazies“Peo­ple are vectors.”

The most sig­nif­i­cant inno­va­tion Romero intro­duced in The Cra­zies can be summed up in its most chill­ing line: “peo­ple are vec­tors.” In Night of the Liv­ing Dead, it was enough for Romero to vaguely drop hints of some sort of mys­te­ri­ous extrater­res­trial radi­a­tion caus­ing the dead to rise. The virus fac­tor would pre­oc­cupy sub­se­quent zom­bie auteurs for decades, par­tic­u­larly Danny Boyle with 28 Days Later. It’s a rich con­cept that touches on many sen­si­tive themes: pol­lu­tion, con­spir­acy the­o­ries, bio­log­i­cal war­fare, sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted dis­eases, and pan­demics. While now vir­tu­ally every non-Romero zom­bie movie defaults to a viral ori­gin story, it seems that Romero him­self is dis­in­ter­ested in the mechan­ics of either zom­bies or cra­zies. He’d much rather focus on randomly-selected bands of sur­vivors, on the run in a world where soci­ety has bro­ken down. Liv­ing humans are a greater dan­ger than mon­sters, and death is no longer absolute.

All the usual Romero tropes are present, par­tic­u­larly insti­tu­tional cor­rup­tion and inep­ti­tude. On the macro level, the U.S. gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary serve their own inter­ests first, to the degree that they func­tion at all. The gov­ern­ment has secretly engi­neered and weaponized a virus with the innocu­ous code­name Trixie and acci­den­tally releases it into the water sup­ply of small town Evans City, PA (a real town, where por­tions were actu­ally filmed). As in Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers, the action remains in the small burb for the entirety of the film. For­get Patient Zero; this is Town Zero.

George A. Romero's The CraziesThe mil­i­tary tries to clean up its own mess

The author­i­ties swoop in and attempt to quar­an­tine the bucolic burb until the virus burns itself out. We learn they were blithely aware of the risks in trans­port­ing the virus, and remain chill­ingly apa­thetic even after the begin­nings of cat­a­stro­phe. One espe­cially cold­blooded gen­eral casu­ally munches sand­wiches while dis­cussing how to con­tain the epi­demic. Romero’s usual sym­pa­thies are for the indi­vid­ual con­science ham­strung by soul­less bureau­cra­cies. Even in Day of the Dead, where the mil­i­tary was the pri­mary source of con­flict, some indi­vid­u­als remained sym­pa­thetic. In The Cra­zies, Major Ryder (Harry Spill­man) and Colonel Peckam (Lloyd Hol­lar) strug­gle as much against their supe­ri­ors’ coun­ter­pro­duc­tive orders as they do try­ing to pacify the cra­zies on the bat­tle­field and pro­tect the uninfected.

Even the civil­ians have deep ties to the armed forces. David (Will MacMil­lan) and Clank (Harold Wayne Jones) are Viet­nam War vet­er­ans who now find them­selves in oppo­si­tion to the insti­tu­tions they once served. They spend most of the movie com­pletely in the dark as to why their town is in chaos, and in fact come into vio­lent con­flict more fre­quently with the mil­i­tary than with their now-insane for­mer friends and neighbors.

Romero also con­tin­ues his tra­di­tion of fore­ground­ing women and peo­ple of color. The ranks of Duane Jones in Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Lori Cardille in Day of the Dead, and John Leguizom­bie Leguizamo in Land of the Dead are joined by Judy (Lane Car­roll), a preg­nant nurse who ini­tially assists the military’s con­tain­ment efforts. Her char­ac­ter is far more sig­nif­i­cant and inte­gral to the plot than her equiv­a­lent in Breck Eisner’s mediocre 2010 remake, played by Radha Mitchell. It’s sad but per­haps unsur­pris­ing that a B-movie from 1973 would fea­ture a stronger fem­i­nist char­ac­ter than one from the 21st century.

George A. Romero's The CraziesLynn Lowry inau­gu­rates her career as a scream queen

But on the other hand (you knew that “but” was com­ing), the other pri­mary female role is played by Lynn Lowry as an impos­si­bly ethe­real and wil­lowy teen with a marked resem­blance to Sissy Spacek. The character’s pri­mary func­tion is to look inno­cently gor­geous and be raped by her infected father. Lowry would go on to a long career as a scream queen in sex­ploita­tion films.

The Cra­zies is largely humor­less in tone, save for ironic music cues through­out. A per­sis­tent mar­tial snare drum plays under oth­er­wise rather dull scenes of Ryder and Peckam argu­ing in a cheap office set, and “Johnny Comes March­ing Home” accom­pa­nies sequences of desen­si­tized sol­diers sum­mar­ily exe­cut­ing detainees.

The estab­lish­ment of mar­tial law and mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion of a town on Amer­i­can soil raise the ques­tion: how do you tell the dif­fer­ence between gen­uine resis­tance and mur­der­ous rage, which is to say, just plain crazy plus capital-c Crazy? Is not killing and shoot­ing other human beings by def­i­n­i­tion crazy, espe­cially when sys­tem­at­i­cally oper­ated by the gov­ern­men­tal and mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions that are sup­posed to pro­tect and serve life? In the movie’s most charged sequence, a priest immo­lates him­self on his church steps. In 1973, it would have been an unmis­tak­able visual allu­sion to the Bud­dhist monks that self-immolated to protest the Viet­nam War. A sol­dier exe­cutes him. Was the priest protest­ing or Crazy? Was the sol­dier mer­ci­ful or Crazy?

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report: