1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 56: From dusk till dawn

Quentin Tarantino, whom my dear cousin, Adam, unfortunately resembles, is the writer of this movie, and one of its stars. (The director is Robert Rodriguez.) The Tarantino character robs banks; takes women as hostages, and then rapes and kills them; lusts after the under-aged; is singled out for a table dance by the most glamorous and dominating woman in the movie (Selma Hayek); and, in general, is perverse, paranoid, vindictive, and disgusting. Eventually, he is turned into a vampire. I wouldn’t be surprised if vampirism were another of Tarantino’s personal fetishes. It’s as if Tarantino assigned all the juiciest vices to himself and then got someone else to direct him enacting them. The Tarantino character and his ruthless but slightly more judicious brother (George Clooney) are on the lam trying to cross from Texas to Mexico. A gleeful reporter (Kelly Preston) details their crimes for the TV. It’s a long and terrible list. This is my favorite scene because the crimes are ennumerated but not shown. One gathers that most of the crimes weren’t strictly necessary. The same could be said of almost everything in the movie, which is a labor of love – love of sin.

Having murdered their previous hostages, the brothers pick up three more: a doubting preacher (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and his son (Ernest Liu). These hostages have more grit than the others, and so they last long enough to develop a touch of Stockholm syndrome – the fresh-faced daughter, especially. The rogues and the hostages hunker down for the night in a trucker bar. Caligula would have liked this bar. It has lots of table dancers and grotesque lowlifes played by such actors as Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin (who also plays two other characters). Here the rogues’ sins catch up with them. It turns out that the bar is run by vampires. I hope I’m not giving too much away.

In the rest of the movie, the living fight the undead. They use all the standard vampire-killing techniques. Well, almost all of them.

What about silver?, asks one of the characters.

Isn’t silver for killing werewolves?

Well, yeah, silver bullets are, but what about silver in general?

Then the daughter hostage asks the sensible question: Does anyone actually have any silver? No? Then it doesn’t matter.

The vampires aren’t tormented and joyless, as in Dracula; they’re more like the jolly creatures in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. What both sorts of monsters have in common is insatiable lust and a certain diabolical amiability. The awkward, hot-headed Tarantino could never receive a high grade as a vampire. Clooney, more suave, is a better candidate for vampirism. But his character is insufficiently lustful. I already have a wife, he tells the Hayek vampire before he impales her with a chandelier.

See, I am falling into the trap of responding to the nerd-pervert on his own terms: A, more than B, has the authentic qualities of a vampire. That is to accord too much respect to a pretty worthless connoisseurist pursuit. Probably, some gutters are more authentically gutter-like than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s good to play in gutters. I’m not saying that vampires don’t make compelling literary figures. Dracula is compelling. I’m saying that you aren’t supposed to like vampires, and that there’s something wrong with you if you do. The Cheech Marin barman, also, is a vulgar connoisseur; in one speech, he expounds upon the varieties of female genitalia on offer in his bar. He describes them with lurid cheer, as objects for the indulgence of one’s basest instincts. This seems to be Tarantino’s attitude toward a lot of things. Or maybe it’s just his shtick. Take some base pursuit (cruelty, lust, revenge, etc.) and dress it up as slickly as possible to revel in it.

And yet, I didn’t hate the movie. The Keitel character is dragged into a monsters’ funhouse, but he retains his decency. So do the Lewis and Liu characters. Tarantino is capable of respecting the non-fetishists in his movies; his underlying plea, I think, is: See, I can appreciate your goodness; just let me play here, in my own awful little corner. Or, at least, that was his early message. Then, as the years went along, he acknowledged that wickedness bleeds into everything, and he started making movies about fighting fire with fire, about torturing Nazis, slavers, and the like.

See also this textbook.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 51: Chungking express

It’s possible that when they were updating Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), the makers of You’ve Got Mail (1998) also had in mind Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.

The Cranberries’ song “Dreams” is in both of these 1990s movies. In Chungking Express, it’s sung in Cantonese by the lead actress, the pop star Faye Wong.

Does Chungking Express owe something to The Shop Around the Corner?

All three of these romantic comedies are about lonely city-dwellers who send each other letters (or emails, or telephone messages). Of these movies, Chungking Express pays the most attention to how long-distance communication can be a device for keeping potential or former lovers at arm’s length. The main characters’ daydreaming is so extreme that, for them, actual contact with another person is almost beside the point.

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Chungking Express tells two tales, one after the other. They are roughly equal in length, but not, I think, in import. The first tale is a very long “induction” that prepares viewers for the second tale – think of the story-before-the-story in The Taming of the Shrew – though it is not the second tale’s “frame story.” (Forgive me if I am not getting the jargon right.)

In the first tale, a young police officer dreams of getting back together with his ex-girlfriend.

He performs various (quasi-fantastical) self-harm rituals:

• he jogs until he is too dehydrated to shed tears;
• having endowed the concept of an expiration date with mystical significance, he eats canned foods after their sell-by dates have passed;
• he drinks dozens of whiskies in one sitting (if we judge by the number of empty glasses).

He decides to force the issue. He will find love with the next woman he meets.

He fixes his heart upon a woman who always wears sunglasses and a yellow wig.

This woman has life-or-death problems which are altogether disconnected from the young man’s fantasies. Unlike the rest of the movie, which is episodic, this woman’s story is narrated with the careful, brisk logic of a heist flick.

In the second tale, another young police officer (Tony Leung) dreams of getting back together with his ex-girlfriend.

She sends him a “Dear John” letter. He doesn’t read it.

Instead, whenever he returns to his apartment, he daydreams that she is there, waiting for him.

He talks to stuffed animals.

He frequents a food stand, the Midnight Express. The young man of the first tale also goes there. The proprietor gives them friendly, realistic advice; neither of them listens.

The proprietor’s young cousin – the Faye Wong character – works at the food stand. She is the most extreme dreamer of them all.

She plays “California Dreamin’” on repeat.

She decides that she loves the Tony Leung character.

She sends him messages. They are utterly cryptic. For her, letter-writing and telephoning are too straightforward. She breaks into her love-object’s apartment, rearranges his clothes, and leaves extra goldfish in his tank.

Now, how in the heck would a guy ever pick up on those signals? Not even an attentive guy would. And the Tony Leung character is less attentive than most. He doesn’t even notice the surplus of goldfish.

One suspects that Faye (that is the Faye Wong character’s name) is pleased just to dream.

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You might be reminded of Amélie, of the 2001 movie. I find Amélie insufferable. As the IMDb puts it: “Amélie is an innocent and naive girl in Paris with her own sense of justice [my italics]. She decides to help those around her and, along the way, discovers love.”

But no, Faye doesn’t have any self-congratulatory “sense of justice.” Refreshingly, she is just an innocent, naive young hedonist.

Will she grow up? That is the question.

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The movie is a stylistic tour de force, but I’m not going to say much about its style, because that’s not what I know how to talk about.

Roger Ebert says:

This is the kind of movie you’ll relate to if you love film itself, rather than its surface aspects such as story and stars. It’s not a movie for casual audiences, and it may not reveal all its secrets the first time through. … If you are attentive to the style, if you think about what Wong is doing, Chungking Express works. If you’re trying to follow the plot, you may feel frustrated. … It needs to be said, in any event, that a film like this is largely a cerebral experience: You enjoy it because of what you know about film, not because of what it knows about life.

A few qualifications:

(1) Faye Wong and Tony Leung are big, big stars – just not in the USA. Even if you’ve never seen them, you can tell they’re stars.

(2) The story as a whole is enjoyable, but you do need to use your brain to make the different parts fit together. Individual sequences go down pleasantly enough. The most delicious one, for me, was confusing at first, but soon enough it made sense. The yellow-wigged woman hires a tailor to measure some middle-aged Indian men for suits. Then she takes them suitcase-shopping. Then she buys condoms. What is going on? A single prop – white powder – tells us the answer.

(3) This brings me to the last qualification. There are “surface aspects” like a movie’s story and the stars who act it out; and then, there are surface aspects, like locations, costumes, and props. Chungking Express is gloriously crammed with props: jukeboxes, suitcases, tinned vegetables, fishtanks, rubber gloves, toy airplanes, liquor bottles, sauce bottles. It’s a feast for the eyes (and not just because there’s so much food). And for the ears, because of the judicious use of pop music. Maybe you do have to be a cineast to get excited by this stuff. I dunno. What I’m confident of is, I could watch this movie again and again and not be bored, just because it has so many shiny things.

But it has nothing like Amélie’s garden gnome that travels around the world. Nothing so twee. Except, maybe, the stuffed animals.

Chungking Express was released in Hong Kong in 1994. In 1996, Quentin Tarantino brought it to theaters in the United States.

The Shop Around the Corner is based on a play by Miklós László.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 8: Scream

Tonight is Halloween, and so this month’s essay is about Dead Teenager movies in general and Scream in particular.

Though it came out in 1996, Scream seems to belong to the later 1990s or early 2000s. Surely this is because of its many sequels, imitators, and parodies.

I’m not an authority on Dead Teenager movies. I haven’t seen very many of them, and my understanding of the genre must be old-fashioned. Nevertheless, I’m going to present my view of its artistic merits and limitations.

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The theme of a Dead Teenager movie is punishment. Gruesome death is meted out for misdeeds.

Misdeeds in a Dead Teenager movie may be terrible or innocuous. If they’re innocuous, then the punishment is for sin as such.

Thus, a Dead Teenager movie is a like a morality play.

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This interpretive framework is more flexible than may initially appear. Consider that it accommodates:

(1) The terrifying It Follows – the best Dead Teenager movie of recent years – although, in that movie, there’s no singular punisher. (It Follows is more like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” than like a paradigmatic “slasher” tale, e.g., Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.)

(2) The Virgin Suicides, in which teenagers punish their parents by punishing themselves.

Scream follows the traditional “slasher” pattern.

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The theme of punishing teenagers is especially urgent to those obsessed with the niceties of teen conduct – I mean, the teenagers themselves. It’s less important to those who’ve outgrown that stage of life. We forgive a person’s youthful acts once we notice that he or she has learned to behave like an adult.

Whenever I view the scything down of a movie teenager, I lament the prematurity of it. I regret that this person never will have the chance to outgrow the teen stage. To my adult eyes, it matters little whether, in that moment, the teenager deserves to be butchered with a knife (or crushed by a garage door, or impaled upon a fence).

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So, I think that the Dead Teenager genre is, at best, compelling to a teenaged (or teen-minded) audience – whose members probably shouldn’t be watching the sex and violence anyway. And if a certain movie is no better than a fine specimen of that genre – which is the usual assessment of Scream – then it’s subject to the same criticism.

All right: I’ve lowered Scream down into a hole. Now, I’ll try to lift it out.

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Scream is thought to have occassioned a paradigm shift for the Dead Teenager genre. It’s often noted that the teenagers in Scream are well-versed in horror-movie conventions. They’ve all seen Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street countless times. Thus they know which characters in their own social circle “deserve” to be killed and which “deserve” to be spared.

That is, unlike their cinematic forerunners, they’re able to apply the earlier movies’ lessons to their own lives.

(The guru in Scream who articulates much of the horror-movie “wisdom” is a geeky video store clerk. But the other characters share his worldview. All judge their lives by the same horror-movie laws.)

Ever since Scream was released, movies have depicted teenagers as living, breathing encyclopedias of popular culture. And this depiction is accurate. I don’t know to what extent Scream helped to make teenagers this way; maybe it just documented something already in full bloom. Indisputably, though, other movies followed Scream in depicting teenagers as culturally hyperaware.

Scream is hardly the first relentlessly allusive screenwork. Other examples from the same decade include The Simpsons and the movies of Quentin Tarantino. In those works, however, the allusiveness is ornamental (or else it’s the whole point, which makes the work not much different from a quiz show). Scream’s allusiveness has a more interesting purpose. Its teenagers cite previous horror movies in the manner of Puritans citing the Bible, as if those movies were sources of practical wisdom. Pop culture and, especially, recent horror movies are what make up these teenagers’ canon.

And this is the crucial fact that makes Scream more than an exercise in a largely irrelevant genre. Scream is a commentary on the flaw that defines teenaged immaturity, which is this:

Teenagers, despite their lack of experience, are supremely confident in the “wisdom” they glean from the culture in their immediate vicinity.

This flaw is imperceptible to teenagers. Only adults can see it.

Why do the teenagers in Scream kill and die?

Because horror movies tell them to.

Why do they obey the horror movies?

Because they haven’t lived long enough to acquire wisdom anywhere else (and, at this stage, their parents seem useless to them as sources of wisdom).

Nor, in their youthful zeal, are the teenagers able to question whether horror movies contain all the wisdom there is.

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One character in Scream is not like the others. This is Dewey (David Arquette), the twenty-four-year-old deputy sheriff. Dewey is shy and self-effacing. He’s no genius. He makes mistakes. He’s barely an adult, as he repeatedly points out.

But compared to the teenagers, he’s a model of clear-headedness.

Another character – Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore – is a cutie-pie brimming with teenaged zest.

A lesser Dead Teenager movie would have made Casey its heroine. But, as we all know, Scream disposes of her after just one scene.