2009-08-07 17:40:19

HURT LOCKER HURTS

Filed under: Kathryn Bigelow, Movies, Near Dark, The Hurt Locker
Posted by: John

Here’s a question that began to gnaw at me after I saw The Hurt Locker. Are war movies ever really about the wars they depict? Or are they always universal? In other words, is the actual historical war—whether WW II, Vietnam or Iraq—always an afterthought, a framework, for the timeless verities of human beings in combat?

Or, in our image-saturated era, are our wars and the movies about them inextricably linked? Do movies in fact shape the way that we look at a war, so we don’t really know how we think—those of us who didn’t fight—until we see the movie, which tells us?

Or do we flip it? Does the ultimate success or failure of any given war irrevocably color the way we look at movies about that war?

When we watch a war movie, in other words, do we watch it helplessly through the lens of the conflict it depicts, feeling more positive about World War II movies, no matter how bleak, because we won and even more to the point, feel that the war itself was a moral victory? When it comes to Vietnam, does even the most upbeat depiction ultimately feel doom-tinged, a gilding of failure?

The question is even more complicated when it comes to a war still in progress, which may be one reason why audiences stay away from movies about Iraq. It’s not so much that we’re too close to the subject. It’s that we don’t know how the story ends, so there’s a disconnect, a sense of the vaccuum, between ourselves and the subject. At some level, if we don’t know how a war ends, we don’t know how to watch the movie.

Should we be happy or sad that our troops are in the frame? Who deserves our sympathy? What if the war turns out to have been a moral catastrophe, and yet we were applauding the efforts of the wrong side, our side?

Can we ever watch war movies as if they are just movies?

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker raises all of these questions, but it’s not a treatise on the cinema of combat. It’s a work of narrative art mapping a terrain of modern war we haven’t seen before. It places us in the heart of a tan and ocher American darkness.

The set-up of the movie is elemental. A three-man team of soldiers dismantles roadside bombs. The team consists of three men: one is a bomb specialist, played by Jeremy Renner, the other two are essentially security guards. The job couldn’t be more dangerous, as we see in the opening few minutes of the film. The intimacy of the men in the unit is offset by the anonmity of the enemy.

The people who plant the bombs can barely be comprehended or understood in this drama, because there’s no time, no space for comprehension. Everything lives on the high wire. The enemy is really the bomb, a hydra-headed entity that never sleeps, knows no hunger and has no judgment. At some deep level, The Hurt Locker seems almost allegorical. The enemy is death itself.

By the end, I was thinking of another movie, the Jon Favreau superhero spectacular Iron Man. The final moments of The Hurt Locker evoke and limn that film in unexpected ways; I would swear Bigelow saw the Iron Man dailies and used her own movie to comment on them, but that’s impossible.

In Bigelow’s movie, we’re not talking about superheroes in latex. In the unit, Iron Man’s armor can’t protect him, and he can’t save the village. He can’t even save one man strapped to a bomb. For that reason, he seems a thousand times more courageous, heroic and terrifying than any mutant wonder in the comics. Renner’s specialist is the real thing, the Watchman on the border of our town, his eyes ablaze.

Watching him walk a shattered Iraqi street, one feels the strangeness and idiosyncracy of war, how it alters the minds and bodies of its player-warriors. Kathryn Bigelow has been making movies about the human attraction to violence for two decades now, but never before has she nailed the heart of her subject so directly.

The movie didn’t answer my questions, but it made me feel them with a moral urgency. Force projection is national projection is self projection. Our soldiers carry us with them into their extremity, which raises a final question, the most frightening. Whatever in the world will we do with ourselves after these wars have ended?

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2009-07-29 18:29:29

DARK SHADOWS OVER TRUE BLOOD

Filed under: 30 Days of Night, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, From Dusk To Dawn, I Am Legend, Kathryn Bigelow, Near Dark, Sex, Television, True Blood, Twilight, Vampires
Posted by: John

Back in 1994, long before anyone had forged a connection between Mormons and vampires, Visible Ink Press published The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of information about the children of the night. In that 800-page compendium, we encounter a blood feast of lore.

There are entries on Bram Stoker, The Addams Family, anemia, the comic book character Baron Blood, Mario Bava, Blacula, Chinese, Bulgarian and Malaysian vampires, Tom Cruise, decapitation, Count Duckula, eucharistic wafers, necromancy, Ingrid Pitt, suicide, sunlight, Hammer films and Abraham Van Helsing. There are also a curious number of entries for local chapters of the Dark Shadows Society, including those to be found in Oklahoma and Milwaukee, but we’ll get back to them in a minute.

What you won’t find in my edition of this encyclopedia is any mention of Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer , which premiered on the WB channel in 1997. You’ll look in vain for Elizabeth Kostova, author of the bestseller The Historian, or the comic series 30 Days Of Night, which became a bloody and scary movie of the same name, or Stephenie Meyer, who wrote Twilight, the most influential and popular vampire saga of recent times, or Alan Ball, the creator of the HBO series True Blood, based on the novels by Charlaine Harris, who is also absent from these pages.

What does that tell you? Back in 1994, long before our current fanger boom, there was still enough material and interest in vampires for a small publishing house to put together an 800-page book on the subject. We’ve been in this vampire-besotted state before.

Now, of course, the encyclopedia would have to be twice as big, making room for entries on all of the above, plus the British television miniseries Ultraviolet; the new Ethan Hawke film The Daybreakers; the film director Guillermo Del Toro (author of his own new series of vampire novels); the straight-to-video Subspecies movies, produced by scrappy independent Full Moon pictures and shot entirely in Romania; the actor Willem Dafoe; the Swedish movie Let The Right One In; the leather-thong-ripping Laurel K. Hamilton; and maybe Paris Hilton.

Yet the encyclopedia reminds us these names are but the latest in the long, unlikely dance of the vampire through our popular culture.

Between 1970 and 1972, it tells us, Hammer Films released no fewer than nine vampire movies, each catering to a slightly different taste, from the old school theatrics of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Taste The Blood Of Dracula (1970) and Dracula A.D. 1972 , in which a bunch of London hippies drag the count forward in time only to get munched down like bloody hash brownies; from the softcore sapphic antics of The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust For A Vampire (1971) and Twins Of Evil (1972), based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic novella Carmilla; to the graphic suckiness of Scars Of Dracula (1971) and the downright kinky Countess Dracula (1971), starring the spectacular Ingrid Pitt; finally, a weird attempt at revisionism in Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter and a dank late masterpiece of the genre, the utterly bizarre Vampire Circus (1972).

I remember seeing some of these movies as Sunday afternoon re-runs on television, particularly Scars Of Dracula, which seems to have been on permanent rotation at our local Channel 11 affiliate through the 1970’s. Others caressed my imagination in the forms of ads in the movie pages of the newspaper.

Throw in the experience of watching the daytime soap opera Dark Shadows afternoons after school in 1970 and 1971, of reading Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot a few years later, not to mention Bram Stoker’s original Dracula somewhere along the way, and absorbing the puppet Count on Sesame Street and the animated Groovy Ghoulies as kiddie entertainment, is it any wonder that I ended up bewitched by this mythology? Is it any wonder that, three decades later, a host of creative types developed a fascination with retractable fangs?

Before we look for deep sociological or cultural reasons to explain the current dominance of the vampire in the popular culture, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether it’s all happening now because it happened so often back then. On the one hand, the late 1960’s and early 1970’s eruption was itself a recycling of material that had been wildly popular over thirty years before, when Tod Browning’s 1932 Dracula saved Universal Studios from ruin. But did the 1930’s see the total saturation of my youth? I don’t think so.

Some have argued persuasively that it’s in the nature of vampires to come back to us every so often in great numbers, peeking in the window, asking to be let inside

In the introduction to Our Vampires, Ourselves, the great Nina Auerbach writes: “We all know Dracula, or think we do, but as this book will show, there are many Draculas—and still more vampires who refuse to be Dracula or to play him. An alien nocturnal series, sleeping in coffins, living in shadows, drinking our lives in secrecy, vampires are easy to stereotype, but it is their variety that makes them survivors. They may look marginal, feeding on human history from some limbo of their own, but for me, they have always been central: what vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become.”

I’ve never heard it said or written better anywhere else. So who are the vampires of our time and what do they say about us?

The first thing to be said is that, Elizabeth Kostova and my own novel Fangland excepted, we seem to have left behind Bram Stoker and his fiend. In the fang boom of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, the novel of 1897 was very much in the air. Christopher Lee played a bloodier, younger, sexier version of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, which was itself based on a play that originated with the novel.

The name of Count Dracula remained critical to the Hammer franchise even while the movies played endlessly with the iconography, diluting it to the point of parody. When Stephen King wrote Salem’s Lot, he gave us a version of Stoker’s monster, and who does the Lestat of Anne Rice conjure except a much more fey version of the same? At the movies, through the decade of the 1970’s, new cinematic versions of the original continued to appear, with Jack Palance, Frank Langella and Louis Jordan all taking turns at the grand old man-bat.

The last one of that cycle, very late in coming, appears to have been Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the early 1990’s. After that, with some appearances here and there, the next great leap in mythology happened on television, and one could argue it’s stayed there. Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel drastically rewrote the rules of the genre for the popular idiom, trashing the character of Dracula as a glam pretty-boy for good measure. The new vampires were romantic punks who liked high school girls, or old bastards who commanded armies of young punks.

Buffy brought to the fore the themes of female sexual empowerment that had flickered around the edges of the drama since the 19th Century, but it did something else as well. Taking its cue from the soap opera Dark Shadows, the show developed an entire moral and metaphysical universe in which the vampire could be the object of human pity and admiration as well a vehicle for satirical dissection of politics and sex.

Lots of books and lesser known movies, like the novels of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and the poetic glories of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, fed into this approach, but no one was more influential than the television impresario Dan Curtis, who had demonstrated already in 1967 that the vampire could be put in almost any situation, as a monster or a heartthrob, and find resonance with an audience of teenagers. In the early 1970’s, 200-year-old Barnabas Collins, played with a remarkable mixture of outlandish hamminess and real depth by Canadian actor Jonathan Frid, made the cover of Tiger Beat magazine along with David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman and Jack Wild.

Dark Shadows, in that sense, is the grandaddy of all that the vampire has now become in our culture: conflicted, sympathetic, horny, almost cuddly. Looking at the latest hit vampire series, True Blood, it’s clear that not much has changed since Dark Shadows, unless it’s for the worse. True Blood, which started out with promise, has turned into a lousy series, poorly acted, ludicrously accented, badly plotted and lazily shot. That’s not the end of the world, though. In its own way, Dark Shadows was also lousy, epically, laughably, juicily, wonderfully lousy, which made it unforgettable as television, particularly for people under the age of ten.

In the first season, True Blood had sort of a literary pedigree. The gifted writer Chris Offutt was on the team, and I like to think he brought a semblance of judgment to the show’s lowbrow vibe. He kept the worst lines, the most egregious performances and the least promising plot lines at bay. Week after week, the show improved, and one could imagine a series that did for the undead what Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under did for undertakers.

But that turned out to be wishful thinking. HBO let Offutt go for reasons unexplained, and you feel the loss. The series is wildly popular, evidently, but that fact that can be explained by the increasing amount of graphic and yet oddly unaffecting sex and the even more in-your-face violence. Success is certainly not the result of quality control.

Last year, in a documentary about the show, Ball said that he’d been influenced by Bigelow’s Near Dark, and I could almost see the connection. The best moments of True Blood did have poetry. Check out the opening credit sequence if you don’t believe me. But I suspect someone handed him a tape of Dark Shadows halfway through last season and explained to him the wild popularity of that show, and he saw the light.

What we haven’t had in a very long time is a truly off-the-wall, off its rocker, naively adventurous and overwrought Gothic soap opera. We still don’t have it, because so far, True Blood doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. It’s not quite bad enough to be Dark Shadows at its jaw-dropping worst, and it’s never good enough to be the same show at its mesmerizing best. With all due respect, Bill Compton, the lead vampire, is not now and never will be Barnabas Collins, and Sam the barkeep can’t hold a candle to Quentin Collins, who became a werewolf.

I wish Anna Paquin were better—or far, far worse—as Sookie Stackhouse, but she seems to have been coached into a plucky, spunky stasis. The character isn’t going anywhere. I wish the scorn for the piety of Christians were funnier and wilder. On Dark Shadows, there was a nasty old pastor named Trask who lusted after his schoolgirl wards and got attacked by a disembodied hand. The sunlight worshippers of True Blood can’t yet hold a candle to that character. The showwears its politics on its sleeve, but I’m not sure they are more interesting or courageous than when they were nothing but subtext on the daytime soap.

Vampires don’t much like to be cordoned off into safe territories. As soon as that happens, they either burn up or go underground, disappearing for a decade or so until the familiarity has washed off, and they can scare us again. In True Blood , we’re seeing that process firsthand. The show makes bloodsuckers–and sex—safe, boring and ultimately tired. The orgy in the most recent episode made Stanley Kubrick’s last movie look like fun. Were we supposed to feel scared of the participants because their eyes had turned black? Or were merely supposed to disapprove?

That’s not the vampire spirit at all. The only way to bring this show–and its dark denizens–back from the death this show represents is to throw the rule book out the window and go for broke. May I suggest three remedies?

1) Hire Broadway actress Elaine Stritch to play a vampire-hunting, foul-mouthed drunk

2)Do more time travel, but make the sets a thousand times crappier.

3)Stop playing so much good music.

Everyone else should pick up The Vampire Book and see what all the fuss was about.

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2009-06-29 10:17:58

THE RESURRECTION OF KATHRYN BIGELOW

Filed under: Kathryn Bigelow, Movies, Near Dark
Posted by: John

It started quietly last year at the Venice Film Festival when her new movie The Hurt Locker premiered to lavish praise. And it didn’t hurt last fall when Alan Ball, the creator of HBO’s new vampire hit True Blood singled out her horror masterpiece Near Dark as a key inspiration for the series.

Now we come to the moment of full bloom for 57-year-old director Kathryn, as her new movie about a bomb squad in Iraq garners the best reviews of any movie this year. The Hurt Locker is an unlikely hit!

Let’s hope the resurrection isn’t short-lived. Our cinema desperately needs an action-film director like Bigelow, someone who understands that an explosion in the physical world is far more terrifying and thrilling than anything computer generated imagery will ever devise. She loves the world of men in action as much as any filmmaker since the days of Howard Hawks and seems to have an inexhaustible appetite for exploring the aesthetics of violence. She’s been a welcome nightmare for cultural studies majors who want to insist on the proper spheres for women in art, and an absolute boon to any lover of cinema who despises the puritanical instinct to subdue art through theory.

So far, commercially, things are looking up. The Hurt Locker had a great opening weekend in four theaters, meaning it will probably open wide throughout the summer. Critics who now lavish her with praise may remember that her career was helped into oblivion by a sustained drubbing that began with the trouncing of Blue Steel as the work of a gun fetishist, continued through the savaging of Strange Days as the product of a woman getting off on the torture of other women, and reached its apex in the dismissal of K-19: The Widowmaker as the last gasp of a woman who really didn’t know her way around big budget action.

Let’s say for the record that all of these films had their problems, but if Michael Bay of Transformers fame was able to keep his career after the twin ghastliness of Pearl Harbor and The Island, there was never any justification for kicking Bigelow off the lot.

Her return is cause for rejoicing, but it’s fragile. Something tells me the goodness won’t stop with the new movie, but she’s just ornery enough to piss off critics again and make herself scarce for audiences once more. If that happens, let’s hope we get a couple of masterpieces before she flames out.

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