you can't win
it's only and always
a doomed final stand
-May 2022
Showing posts with label 1980. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1980. Show all posts
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Monday, January 22, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 6: The Elephant Man (1980)
London, 1870s:
We begin inside a dream, a nightmare of stampeding elephants. We are inside the head of an unfortunate man who has been presented as the deformed son of a woman trampled by an elephant when she was four months pregnant by an unscrupulous freak show ringmaster. This story is, of course, nonsense concocted by the ringmaster, and the unfortunate man no doubt knows this story to be false, and yet he still dreams of elephants. You're told you're one thing for so long you may not start to believe it, exactly, but that's pretty much all you've got. And no matter how ridiculous, no matter how degrading, because that story is coming from the one person your survival depends upon, the one person who shows you some kind of attention, you internalize it, get used to it, grow into the role you've been assigned. This unfortunate man is John Merrick, the Elephant Man.
The Elephant Man-a man with hideous congenital deformities-is exploited for use in a freak show until he is rescued by a humane surgeon who studies this deformed man to increase his own prestige within the scientific medical community. But one form of exploitation is not equivalent to another. One is sheer brutality to make a buck, the other is tempered with compassion, mercy, and the hope that greater understanding of the Elephant Man's condition will benefit all humankind.
The surgeon-a Dr. Treves-is first seen wandering a carnival ground when he suddenly turns around, as though struck by a bolt from the blue, and begins to seek something inside the labyrinthine halls of a freak show. He journeys deeper into this maze, until he comes upon the threshold of the Elephant Man exhibit as it is being shut down by Old Bill for being too obscene, too grotesque. Later, Dr. Treves seeks the Elephant Man again in another labyrinth which almost seems like an unmasked version of the first labyrinth. The first one was decorated with theatrical flair; the second is a nasty, subterranean affair of brick and filth and shadows where John Merrick dwells in a miserable chamber tended by the cruel, drunk ringmaster and his child employee. Dr. Treves bribes the ringmaster to get a private exhibition of the Elephant Man. In glorious black and white, Merrick is revealed as a piteous living expression of physical suffering, and we see Dr. Treves, a model of British stoicism, shed tears in stricken silence.
Dr. Treves is magnificently played by Anthony Hopkins-Hannibal Lecter himself-who captures all the nuances and inner conflict of a British gentleman of the late 1800s who is expected to maintain control of his emotions at all times even when he is absolutely devastated by the sight of the afflicted Merrick. Dr. Treves is a model of exercising strength through a combination of intellect and compassion. He takes mercy on Merrick . . . and yet, his interest is also driven by a desire to make a medical breakthrough he can exhibit to his colleagues and take credit for research into the legion deformities with which Merrick suffers. Dr. Treves is aware of this contradiction inside himself, and, in an uncharacteristic show of vulnerability, asks his wife directly, "Am I a good man, or a bad man?" This new vulnerability and openness which gives him a quiet strength is set in motion by the time he spends with Merrick. Hopkins is perfect in every scene. For me, this is his finest film.
Merrick is played by John Hurt buried under prosthetic makeup that is indescribably grotesque. Do a google image search for "the Elephant Man," or "Joseph Merrick," which is the actual name of the real life Elephant Man. Hurt is one of those actors who never seemed to be driven by ego. He was the guy in Alien who had the alien baby rip its way out of his chest. And then he spoofed himself in Spaceballs. He played a doomed subject of totalitarianism in 1984, and the doomed figurehead of a totalitarian regime targeted by a determined anarchist revolutionary in V for Vendetta. He died this past year of pancreatic cancer. Hit up his filmography. Hurt was an actor's actor. He played just about everything, and he embodies Merrick, his physical difficulties, and his high-pitched voice as though they were all second nature to him.
Other standout performances include a hard-boiled Freddie Jones as the alcoholic ringmaster; a radiant Anne Bancroft as a theatre producer who befriends Merrick; and a delightful John Gielgud as Dr. Treves's rational, enlightened superior in the medical establishment.
The Elephant Man's strongest scenes depict Merrick's process of healing as he discovers his value as a human being with help from Dr. Treves and others who come like angels of mercy into his life. Merrick is a man who has lived in a state of pure brutalization, and so he must learn what it is to be loved, and to love himself, and to have dreams and hopes for the future. The dark and twisted dream of a misbegotten child born of an elephant's hoof is displaced by new dreams of his own creation, that are more in tune with the reality of his humanity.
If the movie has a flaw, it has to do with that whole "based on a true story" thing. Do a little research, and you will pick up very quickly on what's fiction and what's somewhat factual here. On the whole, I think this movie is a credible dramatization of a process of healing, but it is most definitely not a documentary. The real story of Joseph Merrick, who only lived 27 years, is much more complex, and in some ways is at odds with this film version.
Another flaw is that some of the scenes are played for absolute historical realism, while others veer into melodrama that doesn't quite fit, although they are well played by the actors here. David Lynch's exacting direction almost makes it seamless. The understated dialogue, punctuated with outbursts of great intensity, also keeps things mostly on track.
These missteps are, for me, mostly forgivable.
Bottom line: this is Lynch's most nakedly compassionate, and humane film. Shot in glorious black and white, immaculately designed and lit; and acted to perfection, it is a haunting evocation of a healer descending into a hellish labyrinth of misery to rescue a suffering soul.
NEXT: 1/29/18: Dune (1984)
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Friday, October 19, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW: THE FOG (1980)
Music/Direction by John Carpenter
Written by Debra Hill and John Carpenter
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace
Produced by Debra Hill, Charles B. Bloch, Barry Bernardi, and Pegi Brotman
Starring
Hal Holbrook
Adrienne Barbeau
Jamie Lee Curtis
Tom Atkins
Janet Leigh
Nancy Loomis
John Houseman
Charles Cyphers
Darwin Joston
Written by Debra Hill and John Carpenter
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace
Produced by Debra Hill, Charles B. Bloch, Barry Bernardi, and Pegi Brotman
Starring
Hal Holbrook
Adrienne Barbeau
Jamie Lee Curtis
Tom Atkins
Janet Leigh
Nancy Loomis
John Houseman
Charles Cyphers
Darwin Joston
Review by William D. Tucker.
The Fog. Here's another John Carpenter movie that I didn't get the first time around. Once again, it was a victim of my own narrow tastes the first time I saw it.
I've never really liked ghost stories. Ghosts aren't scary to me. Why? Ghosts, like all things supernatural, do not exist. But even if they do exist, what's the most that they could do? Move the furniture around? Muck up the walls and ceiling with some ecto-plasm? Put up a wailing racket? Ghosts, even if they did exist, are harmless, lame, laughable, and boring. Movies about ghosts, with some exceptions (like Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, Kwaidan, Hausu, Poltergeist, the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Frighteners, and The Exorcist--and yeah I consider Pazuzu to just be a particularly aggressive ghost), are not interesting or scary to me. Why fear that which has never been real and never will be real? Hard to suspend disbelief over stuff like that.
You know what's scary to me? An asshole with an assault rifle and a massively distorted sense of entitlement. Ebola. Nuclear weapons. Cancer. A country that would let George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and all their crew have another four years. Torture. A country buffet on a Sunday afternoon. Prisons. My fellow human beings. You know, things from real life.
If you want to make an interesting ghost story, then you gotta have some kind of compelling reason for the dead to come back to life. Because once you're dead, that's it. You only get one shot, and then it's all over. No Konami code in this life, people. One shot, make it count. If you're gonna be breaking the rules, and rising from the dead and all that nonsense, you must have a fire of some kind inside your rotting mind. Some unfinished business. A grudge that won't quit. Can't be any petty bullshit. Gotta be for real if you're gonna be violating the laws of nature and all that.
And what about the living? How do they respond to the intrusion of the supernatural into material reality?
The Fog basically consists of decent, average human beings living in a California coastal town under assault by a ruthless supernatural force. But it takes its time. It sets up the environment of the coastal town, and offers a representative sampling of the population there under threat of destruction, and then slowly unleashes its ghostly terrors. For me, when I first saw it, it was way too slow.
At the time (I was a teenager) I was into Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Dawn of the Dead, Hong Kong action movies, The Evil Dead, Aliens, The Thing--I wanted anger, and blood, and heavy weapons firing nonstop. I wanted braindead macho motherfuckers getting 86ed and taking the whole world with them in a welter of blood and bullets. I wanted the red meat alien carnage of Aliens and John Carpenter's merciless masterpiece The Thing. I got off on the notion of shopping mall assholes turned into zombie bullet-catchers like in Dawn of the Dead. Measured against all this, The Fog was a Thornton Wilder play. Our Town with ghost pirates.
Watching it again, I find that I was just too uncivilized in my adolescence to appreciate the fine craftsmanship of The Fog. Now, I kind of get it.
Like I said, it takes its time. Carpenter uses the first half hour or so to put his widescreen framing to subtle, effective use by cutting from one location of a quiet, kind of lonely California coastal town to another, while weird things happen. Windows shatter. Electric and electronic devices go haywire. An old-timer played by John Houseman does a deadly serious recitation of a ghost story to a group of kids. A whiskey priest played by the one and only Hal Holbrook discovers a dark secret within the walls of his church. Adrienne Barbeau's radio DJ ties all these scenes together with her husky, welcoming voice. Other characters are introduced, and Carpenter takes his time to set up all the players in this drama.
When I was a teenager, I failed to appreciate this more measured approach to telling a story. No flashy, self-conscious displays of verbal wit. No gunfights in slow motion shown from numerous camera angles. No torsos bursting with extraterrestrial hunger. Just a mood of quiet doom slowly creeping through a small town in the dead of night.
When the horror finally does manifest itself, it's much like the Shape in Halloween. You don't see nearly as much as you think you do even when the killing starts. One important difference between the supernatural agents in The Fog from the Shape is that here we have a rational motive for their actions. The Shape is just a force of blind destruction sans emotions sans logic sans survival instinct. If you wanna get Lovecraftian about it, you could say that the Shape was a manifestation of Azathoth, the blind idiot god of total destruction, whereas the entities within the fog are agents of retribution taking up a cause out of the past. They are a manifestation of an irrational, supernatural force that actually has a rational motivation for its actions--a nifty paradox to find in a horror flick.
Another interesting contrast: The Fog, like Assault on Precinct 13, takes up the the theme of vengeance. But there is a difference between The Fog and Precinct 13. The Fog is about vengeance for sins in the distant past, and Assault on Precinct 13 is about sins of the present. And, also, Assault on Precinct 13 is about human beings using non-supernatural methods--assault weapons, fanatic ideology, teamwork--whereas The Fog is about a supernatural entity with a somewhat limited ability to disrupt material reality to achieve its ends. The entities within the fog can disrupt electrical generators, cause windows to shatter, and can destroy telecom systems, and, when they get close in to their human targets, they can manifest humanoid forms armed with sickles, spikes, knives, swords, and very powerful strangler's hands. It's a hydra-headed force of destruction that is similar in its tactics and strategy to the enemies found in Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars.
I really dig The Fog, now. I've grown up enough to appreciate it. It has a slow build to a terrific climax, and a strong cast: Hal Holbrook, Andrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Charles Cyphers, and Darwin Joston. It emphasizes character, mood, and suspense over blood and gore. Watching it is more like reading a story by Poe or Lovecraft, or maybe something by Stephen King. It's good fun.
The Fog. Here's another John Carpenter movie that I didn't get the first time around. Once again, it was a victim of my own narrow tastes the first time I saw it.
I've never really liked ghost stories. Ghosts aren't scary to me. Why? Ghosts, like all things supernatural, do not exist. But even if they do exist, what's the most that they could do? Move the furniture around? Muck up the walls and ceiling with some ecto-plasm? Put up a wailing racket? Ghosts, even if they did exist, are harmless, lame, laughable, and boring. Movies about ghosts, with some exceptions (like Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, Kwaidan, Hausu, Poltergeist, the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Frighteners, and The Exorcist--and yeah I consider Pazuzu to just be a particularly aggressive ghost), are not interesting or scary to me. Why fear that which has never been real and never will be real? Hard to suspend disbelief over stuff like that.
You know what's scary to me? An asshole with an assault rifle and a massively distorted sense of entitlement. Ebola. Nuclear weapons. Cancer. A country that would let George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and all their crew have another four years. Torture. A country buffet on a Sunday afternoon. Prisons. My fellow human beings. You know, things from real life.
If you want to make an interesting ghost story, then you gotta have some kind of compelling reason for the dead to come back to life. Because once you're dead, that's it. You only get one shot, and then it's all over. No Konami code in this life, people. One shot, make it count. If you're gonna be breaking the rules, and rising from the dead and all that nonsense, you must have a fire of some kind inside your rotting mind. Some unfinished business. A grudge that won't quit. Can't be any petty bullshit. Gotta be for real if you're gonna be violating the laws of nature and all that.
And what about the living? How do they respond to the intrusion of the supernatural into material reality?
The Fog basically consists of decent, average human beings living in a California coastal town under assault by a ruthless supernatural force. But it takes its time. It sets up the environment of the coastal town, and offers a representative sampling of the population there under threat of destruction, and then slowly unleashes its ghostly terrors. For me, when I first saw it, it was way too slow.
At the time (I was a teenager) I was into Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Dawn of the Dead, Hong Kong action movies, The Evil Dead, Aliens, The Thing--I wanted anger, and blood, and heavy weapons firing nonstop. I wanted braindead macho motherfuckers getting 86ed and taking the whole world with them in a welter of blood and bullets. I wanted the red meat alien carnage of Aliens and John Carpenter's merciless masterpiece The Thing. I got off on the notion of shopping mall assholes turned into zombie bullet-catchers like in Dawn of the Dead. Measured against all this, The Fog was a Thornton Wilder play. Our Town with ghost pirates.
Watching it again, I find that I was just too uncivilized in my adolescence to appreciate the fine craftsmanship of The Fog. Now, I kind of get it.
Like I said, it takes its time. Carpenter uses the first half hour or so to put his widescreen framing to subtle, effective use by cutting from one location of a quiet, kind of lonely California coastal town to another, while weird things happen. Windows shatter. Electric and electronic devices go haywire. An old-timer played by John Houseman does a deadly serious recitation of a ghost story to a group of kids. A whiskey priest played by the one and only Hal Holbrook discovers a dark secret within the walls of his church. Adrienne Barbeau's radio DJ ties all these scenes together with her husky, welcoming voice. Other characters are introduced, and Carpenter takes his time to set up all the players in this drama.
When I was a teenager, I failed to appreciate this more measured approach to telling a story. No flashy, self-conscious displays of verbal wit. No gunfights in slow motion shown from numerous camera angles. No torsos bursting with extraterrestrial hunger. Just a mood of quiet doom slowly creeping through a small town in the dead of night.
When the horror finally does manifest itself, it's much like the Shape in Halloween. You don't see nearly as much as you think you do even when the killing starts. One important difference between the supernatural agents in The Fog from the Shape is that here we have a rational motive for their actions. The Shape is just a force of blind destruction sans emotions sans logic sans survival instinct. If you wanna get Lovecraftian about it, you could say that the Shape was a manifestation of Azathoth, the blind idiot god of total destruction, whereas the entities within the fog are agents of retribution taking up a cause out of the past. They are a manifestation of an irrational, supernatural force that actually has a rational motivation for its actions--a nifty paradox to find in a horror flick.
Another interesting contrast: The Fog, like Assault on Precinct 13, takes up the the theme of vengeance. But there is a difference between The Fog and Precinct 13. The Fog is about vengeance for sins in the distant past, and Assault on Precinct 13 is about sins of the present. And, also, Assault on Precinct 13 is about human beings using non-supernatural methods--assault weapons, fanatic ideology, teamwork--whereas The Fog is about a supernatural entity with a somewhat limited ability to disrupt material reality to achieve its ends. The entities within the fog can disrupt electrical generators, cause windows to shatter, and can destroy telecom systems, and, when they get close in to their human targets, they can manifest humanoid forms armed with sickles, spikes, knives, swords, and very powerful strangler's hands. It's a hydra-headed force of destruction that is similar in its tactics and strategy to the enemies found in Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars.
I really dig The Fog, now. I've grown up enough to appreciate it. It has a slow build to a terrific climax, and a strong cast: Hal Holbrook, Andrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Charles Cyphers, and Darwin Joston. It emphasizes character, mood, and suspense over blood and gore. Watching it is more like reading a story by Poe or Lovecraft, or maybe something by Stephen King. It's good fun.
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