Near Dark

The recent, richly deserved success of Kathryn Bigelow’s magnum opus, The Hurt Locker, has reinvigorated my interest in the director, or perhaps I should say “engendered” instead as I never paid any attention to the names attached to films back when I first saw some of her movies. Given my anal approach to (re-)investigating artists, I naturally returned to the beginning, to Bigelow’s vampire-centric major debut, Near Dark. Abetting this decision was the recent re-evaluation of the film in relation to that cultural behemoth, Twilight (the recent DVD release even displays its undead protagonist in a sparkling profile to recall Edward, albeit with a glint in the eyes that undermines any serious comparison). Does, however, Near Dark hold up on its own merits, or has its renewed reputation the result of its status as an “anti-Twilight” among those who feel the need for such a balancing force?

As it turns out, a little from Column A, a little from Column B. Near Dark reveals much of Bigelow’s incredible talent, her ability to mix fast-paced action -- and there are a number of handheld shots, some of them set in character’s point of view, an early precursor to the style she employed in her latest feature -- with a clear aesthetic and an definite sense of spatial relations. On top of that is the glorious weirdness of the narrative, a gonzo mash-up of vampire fiction, Westerns, hillbilly stereotypes and the road movie. It’s not the sort of material a director would choose for a breakthrough feature, particularly one meant to rake in dough and not play at festivals, and in some ways it marks Bigelow’s sense of adventurousness and resolve as much as her decision to film a war movie in extreme heat in a potentially hostile location.

Near Dark opens with the strains of Tangerine Dream -- oh, TD, you secretly ran the world during the Reagan years, didn’t you? -- as Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a good ol’ country boy drives through a one-horse town in a dilapidated pickup. He swaps pleasant insults with buddies before spotting a pretty young woman strolling down the street. Caleb saunters up to Mae (Jenny Wright), an odd duck who picks up on certain words Caleb uses innocently, such as “bite” and “dying.” To drive the point home, she discusses the stars with Caleb and mentions how she will still be alive to see the light a star just emitted when it finally reaches Earth in a billion years. Mae calls their budding date short as the dawn breaks, but not before leaving Caleb with a parting gift, or two.

Caleb shakes off his bleeding love nip and walks home, and we cannot tell as he loses strength and limps forward whether the smoke around him is dust kicked up by his shuffle or his body sizzling. Only when Bigleow zooms in on the lad’s blackening face does the extent of his curse become clear. Within sight of his homestead and his father and sister, Caleb finds himself yanked into a mysterious van with covered windows.

The resultant tear across the dusty West makes for such an oddball story that Near Dark’s narrative largely stands the test of time, as parody has not diluted it; who could take the piss out of a film that introduces us to such a weird group of vampires in that van, among them Mae and camps played by Lance Henriksen, who adds gravitas to the strangest B-movie premises, and Bill Paxton, still firmly and wonderfully entrenched in his ‘80s era overacting?

These vampires can only be described in an adjective that seems so naturally fitting but has not applied to popular vampires in some time: bloodthirsty. They don’t kill out of some grand evil design, nor do they soften their images with quieter moments of reflection -- a vampire trapped in the body of a prepubescent boy (Joshua John Miller) mentions his situation, only to be instantly shot down for always going on about it. These vamps are just hungry, and they go out every night to find a meal.

This approach to characterization restricts the narrative to a fairly simple tale, but Bigelow makes the most of the spare story through brilliant shot and choreographed sequences. Her daytime shots have a dusty haze over them, as if the earth beneath our feet was created from the ash of crisped vampires past. At night, the air is cooler and cleaner, yet also more unsettling and ethereal. Nighttime is feeding time for these unholy creations, yet also the only moment in which they can go outside – I find Tangerine Dream’s ‘80s soundtracks to be hit or miss, but the one they supply here, for his hillbilly-vampire road Western, works precisely because of this aesthetic choice).

Bigelow’s action scenes are no less striking. The killing spree/feeding frenzy at the bar perfectly paces tension, from Bill Paxton’s first teasing of the patrons and bartender to the gentle but unmistakable escalation of hostile moods before the “family” starts picking off victims with cold precision. The awaited explosion of action never comes, even when the bartender shoots Caleb, thus preserving that mood of anxiety through the end of the sequence. Even better is the shootout between the vampires and a police squad who tracks them down, a scene that turns the old shootout visual style on its head. We’re used to seeing bullets pierce through walls, leaving behind holes that let in smoky light, but this film presents the holes -- and the light they allow -- as the true danger, not the bullets themselves.

Where the film falls flat is its final act, which contains a cure for vampirism that is a reach even as a solution to a fictional disease, as well as a final confrontation that doesn’t particularly have a reason to exist, other than to provide explosive closure to events. The rookie actors do not always deliver their lines with the utmost believability: Pasdar in particular fails to sell the few emotional moments of the film. The computer-animated flames** that burst from the vampires’ bodies, though far from terrible for the time, look dated today (the physical makeup effects remain exemplary).

Nevertheless, Near Dark is a hell of a fun film, bolstered by appropriately weighty work from Henriksen as the devilish leader of the clan, a performance that buoys the younger, inexperienced actors. Bigelow’s take on the vampire legend is down, dirty and vicious, and it contains a brutal brusqueness under its occasionally hypnotic visuals so lacking in modern vampiric lore. I also amused myself greatly by looking for connections to Joss Whedon’s seminal series Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the covered-up RV recalls a similar mode of transport used in the fifth season, while I suspect that Nathan Fillion’s Southern preacher-from-hell Caleb takes him name at least in part from the protagonist of this film.

I cannot imagine what it must be like for Bigelow to constantly deal with the issue of her gender, from both the gently condescending supporters who find it so amazing that a woman could make the sort of films she directs and the deniers who would fault her for daring not to craft films solely about women, as if featuring male protagonists somehow constitutes a sexual sellout. She does not make action films that are good “for a chick”; she makes action films that far exceed the capabilities of nearly all action filmmakers. Near Dark, with its surprisingly assured genre crossover, richly developed aesthetic and mostly excellent pacing, proves that this was true even when she started directing back in the genre’s heyday.


**Commenter javi was right to point out the unlikeliness that the flames would be computer animated and suggests that they were composite shots instead. Thanks for bringing this to my attention

Dead Man

Jim Jarusch's '80s filmography was enough to make me an ardent fan, but nothing prepared me for Dead Man. At once a film far beyond his low-key, minimalistic satires and the fulfillment of their possibilities, it applies his unique style to a genre aesthetically antithetical to it: the Western. The Western is a genre about bigness: big settings, big personas and, most of all, big guns. For Jarmusch to make one, even an alternative "acid" Western, seems on paper to be madness.

Instead, it takes the idea of the Acid Western to its extreme. Acid Westerns grew out of the counterculture of the '60s, as well as the genre's appropriation by other countries, specifically the Italians with their spaghetti Westerns. Both genres praised individual strength and personal morality: classic Westerns depicted the individualistic hero as a beacon of general Americana, a reflection of our can-do attitude and a literal representation of pioneering spirit, while the Westerns of the post-Vietnam era presented the individual as the true source of morality in the face of corrupt society, even if the counterculture ideals could not be fully applied as the heroes still resorted to mass displays of violence that only a few seemed to genuinely regret (and none of them half so much as the samurai in Yojimbo and Sanjuro, the basis for the Man With No Name and therefore countless other Western anti-heroes).

Dead Man, however, strips away all notions of nobility in the Old West. Everything that you need to know about the episodic film can be gleaned from its first vignette, a short film in its own right: William Blake (Johnny Depp), a broke accountant from Cleveland, scraped together just enough cash to head out to the frontier town of Machine where he's been guaranteed a job by metal works owner Mr. Dickinson. The roughly nine-minute sequence begins with Blake in a train car surrounding by passengers of his social status. They're all well-dressed, polite, headed out to the West for new and bold opportunities, ideal Western characters all. Jarmusch fades to some time later, and Blake looks up to see a few new passengers of the scruffier variety. This happens again, and suddenly Blake is sitting among disgusting rabble, scraggly beards and missing teeth. A coal-coated boilerman (Crispin Glover) approaches and warns him of heading out west to Machine ("to Hell," as he calls it). As the boilerman continues to caution Blake, the other passengers suddenly open the windows and fire at buffalo roaming the landscape beside the train. "Government reckons they [various passengers of this sort] killed about a million last year." In nine minutes, Jarmusch masterfully takes our idea of the cinematic Western and destroys it, presenting us instead with a group of ordinary people looking not to find prosperity through honest work out West but to taint and rape another part of the Earth after ruining someplace east beyond capacity.

The boilerman's warnings ring in Blake's head as he walks through the decadent town of Machine, and when he arrives at Dickinson's a callous secretary (John Hurt) says with ample derision that Blake's message was postmarked two months ago and the position has long since been filled. That night, a former prostitute takes pity on him when he helps her up in the street and takes him back to her place, only for her ex- (and Mr. Dickinson's son) Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) to pop in and shoot both Thel and Bill, killing her and lodging a bullet near William's heart.

If the film had not yet established its break from the genre to your satisfaction, here the film moves into marvelously, woefully uncharted territory. Blake is rescued by a Native American named Nobody, a man of mixed tribal descent and a European upbringing who tells Blake that he couldn't remove the bullet from his chest and that his days are numbered. Nobody refers to his new companion as "stupid fucking white man" until he at last asks for William's name, only to react with a start. "You're William Blake?" he asks incredulously, "Then you are a dead man!" Nobody is thinking of the poet William Blake, his literary hero and seemingly the one aspect of his Western education for which he is grateful. Suddenly enthused at what he believes to be the incarnation of the poet, Nobody decides to take Blake to the Pacific Coast so that he might return this vessel to the spirit-world, and along the way they will kill any white men who cross them. Jarmusch says that he used Blake's poetry in connection with the Native American history he studied for the film as he thought Blake's style and topics fit nicely with what he discovered about Native Americans and their perspectives, so perhaps he works through Nobody, realigning William Blake's legacy to the Indians by breaking violently from the Europeans.

That's not to say that Nobody is a well-cultured savage looking for revenge; on the contrary, Dead Man contains the fairest depiction of Native Americans I've ever seen in a Western. The materialistic, imperialist whites headed west for money and found harsh, unforgiving terrains. Even so, they subjugated the Indians there simply to claim the land as Manifest Destiny and stuck it out on principle. Perhaps the greatest example of this comes when Nobody sends Blake into a camp of mad fur traders led by "Sally," a cross-dressing, Bible-preaching trader played by Iggy Pop. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in a Jarmusch film, yet it ultimately works brilliantly: the traders tread the line between absurdity and terror, a trio driven mad by the West's desolation that strike us initially as loopy until they reveal themselves as demented rapists.

Blake and Nobody's tripped-out journey shows how easily demons can be awakened in the face of the nothingness of the West. Nobody, witty and kind, is also a merciless killer in battle. Abducted as a child, Nobody was paraded around the United States before being placed on a ship and sent to England to be gawked at and, eventually, educated. Naturally a victim of white racism, his European adolescence alienated him from the Native Americans. That feeling of solitude is perhaps what drives him to push Blake into murder, but it does not explain why he would go out of his way to save the man's life without ever knowing him, nor his general amicability with others. The two men, cut off socially from their peers, must instead connect on genuine, personal grounds, and Blake simply finds that the Indians are more charitable and open than his own race.

Their bond is juxtposed with a trio of bounty hunters sent by Charlie's dad, the metal works owner Mr. Dickinson (Robert Mitchum, in his final role), to avenge his son and also, perhaps preferably, retrieve his pinto. The three -- an African-American boy, a loudmouthed fool, and a sadistic cannibal named Cole (Lance Henriksen) -- sleep with one eye open watching each other, but wariness doesn't save the other two from Cole, who tires of both, kills them and roasts them on a fire. Another major white figure is a racist missionary (Alfred Molina) who denies supplies to Nobody that he in turn offers to Blake, then attempts to kill Blake upon recognizing him.

True to his style, Jarmusch uses sparse dialogue in the film, but it speaks volumes, as much, if not more so, than even the most intricate Tarantino riff. As Nobody confuses Depp's Blake with the poet Blake, William Blake's work seeps into the movie, always working within the context of the film and often on several layers above it. When Nobody tells Blake they're being followed, William starts to formulate a plan, realizes he has nothing and immediately asks Nobody what to do. "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow," Nobody responds sardonically. The line is a direct lift from Blake's poetry (far from the only one), but in that one moment we can read much into Nobody and his sense of irony: the eagle of course represents the United States, our proud vision of ourselves, while the crow, the meeker bird and, in the context of the quote, lesser and mediocre compared to the eagle, stands for Native Americans, possibly the Blackfoot that make up a part of Nobody's heritage (you could argue that it stands for the Crow Nation, but I think that's too literal and the Crow don't feature in the film and they were even enemies of the Blackfoot). Nobody's delivery of the line coldly mocks the white attitude toward the natives, and in a larger sense prevents the moment from becoming Hollywood "come together" tripe by pointing out how ludicrous it is for any white people to think this way instead of praising one white person for thinking progressively.

Blake's poetry isn't the only allusion to other works, however, and many of Jarmusch's references are slyly anachronistic. The names of several minor characters mirror 20th century musicians such as Lee Hazelwood or Benmont Tench. Nobody's real name, "He Who Talk Loud Say Nothing," is a reference to the James Brown classic "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing." In fact, I couldn't help but think of Homer's Odyssey in connection to Nobody: in the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus gives his name as "Nobody" so that when he attacks the beast, his screams of "Nobody is killing me!" turn potential helpers away. When Blake stumbles into Iggy Pop's (himself a 20th century musician) camp, he inadvertently lures the rapists into making the first move and sealing their fate by saying "I'm with Nobody."

Jarmusch said he was attracted to the idea of a Western because of its "inseparable connection to America"¹, and Dead Man certainly presents us with a vision of America. However, his West demonstrates the fascism that a celebration of individualism, when married with a sense of the superiority of personal morals over societal norms, can create. Nobody gives Blake hallucinogens to send him on a "vision quest," and part of his alignment with nature results in the death of two U.S. Marshals. When Charlie attacked him in the bed, Blake took three shots to hit a man standing still not 20 feet away. Slowly though, the influence of his surroundings and the people already converted by them reveal how easy it is to take another person's life in the wilderness. Jarmusch's Western doesn't celebrate its connection to America, it unveils our propensity to violence.

Neil Young's scattered electric twang of a soundtrack sets the mood for the picture, gently warping the background in its quieter moments and swelling into grungy, distorted nightmares as Blake's spiritual quest awakens the beast within to send him back to this sinister nature. It's the perfect capper to one of the most unique and rewarding cinematic experiences of my life. I'm never quite sure what constitutes a revisionist Western -- many include the spaghetti Westerns, but for my money Leone and many of the others never drifted far enough away from conventional Western tropes to qualify, save the odd duck here and there -- but either way Dead Man easily slides into my #2 spot behind Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Both are films that dismantle the structure of the Western, bringing it all crashing to the ground, but where Altman did so with regret and mourning, Jarmusch tackles the situation with pent-up rage, a fearsome rejection of the lie Hollywood fed us for decades. I would not go so far as to call Dead Man realistic -- anyone who has seen it knows that it's too out-there for that tag -- but here is a film that seeks to peel away the artifice of the Old West to show us an unforgiving terrain that consumes all those foolish enough to try to conquer it.

¹ http://www.nytrash.com/deadman/deadjj.html#2

The Terminator

Its sequel may get all the love, but The Terminator is the perfect demonstration of why James Cameron is one of the great action directors of all-time: underneath all the effects, you gotta have talent. It's easy to get lost in the awesome spectacle of Aliens, or The Abyss, but the reason those films work so well can be directly attributed to Cameron's steadfast sense of pacing, placement and theme. All of these attributes are on display in his first major directorial effort, a pre- and post-apocalyptic thriller made with a scant $6.5 million, and it's impressive how confident a filmmaker he is with only some design work on Escape From New York and half a directing job on Pirahna II: The Spawning (bet that one was a winner) under his belt.

While the main story may concern a literal killing machine tearing through waves of bystanders to get to the mother of the future savior of mankind before he can be born, The Terminator actually concerns what would be a main theme of Cameron's up until he shifted gears with Titanic: the fear of nuclear annihilation (it remains to be seen if nukes will play some role in the upcoming Avatar, but I doubt it). For a guy who made four of the best action extravaganzas ever put on the silver screen, Jim Cameron sure does loathe man's violent streak. In this world, of course, mankind didn't wipe itself out: the machines it built to wipe each other out fulfilled their purpose. That is gloriously understated in the film series, though I imagine it just never occurred to McG at all; so many action films attempt to carry themselves as more serious fare but can never address themes without looking like children. Here at last is a director who will let us see the tragic irony of an entity like Skynet without jamming it down our throats.

Let's also not forget Cameron's eye for casting. After all, he did launch Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, two actors who were earning accolades but weren't drawing mainstream attention, into the stratosphere and both have yet to come down. And he did that with the weakest writing of his career! Imagine what a taut piece like this can do. This may be a backhanded compliment, but Arnold Schwarzenegger was born to play the Terminator: he speaks only a handful of lines in the entire film, but makes up for it with his hulking physique and that terrifying, emotionless face (normally a source of unintentional humor). As much as Brad Fiedel's low metallic clanging keeps you on the edge of your seat, it's Schwarzenegger's impenetrable frame and implacable devotion that will make you drive fingernails through the armrest.

To remember his performance at the expense of Michael Biehn's future soldier Kyle Reese and Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor, however, would be a mistake. People justly remember Hamilton's performance in T2, in which she played one of the toughest, most capable chicks in film, over this one, but this Sarah Connor makes for a far more interesting character study. At the start of the film, she's a lazy, self-absorbed product of the '80s, all hairspray and bad pop and no drive. Not only does Sarah now have to deal with a machine programmed solely to destroy her at all costs, but she must place her trust into a raving loon who comes bearing prophecies about her unborn son when she isn't even pregnant. Watching Hamilton shift ever so slowly from the ditzy and craven waitress into someone who might one day impart enough survival wisdom onto her son that he might lead an entire army is a sight to be behold.

Biehn, for his part, behaves like a man who was born on the brink of total annihilation. He's as curt as his robotic foil, and he off-handedly mentions learning to fashion plastic explosives as a child, as if nothing could be more pedestrian. But there's a romantic side to him, one that went back in time as much to meet the woman in the photograph he so cherished as protect his beloved commander. Of course, that romantic side becomes the crux of the entire timeline, which opens a number of paradoxes I'm too tired to consider.

The interplay between Kyle and Sarah exhibits why Cameron's epic films stick with you long after the explosions stop. You see, every action movie needs a subplot for scale. They are often rote and distracting (see: Transformers 2's ridiculous "say you love me" story between Sam and Mikaela), but a good emotional current is necessary for a memorable action ride. Cameron knows this, and his intimate subplots, be they the maternal bond between Ripley and Newt or the paternal one between the Terminator and young John Connor (still the most surprisingly moving arc I've ever seen in an action film), keep the narrative grounded in the real world even when Cameron does the impossible elsewhere.

The film's only discernible flaws are those that come with age. The stop motion movement of the fleshless Terminator, and the scenes within the club Tech Noir are just an unfortunate reminder of what people actually wore in public in the '80s. That these are the best issues I can come up with reflects upon the film's lasting power. Cameron has a way of giving weight to his action, so that the beautifully lit shootout in the police station feels horrific, not exciting, and you can only register relief when Sarah finally destroys her pursuer once and for all.

As a kid (yeah, somehow I watched these as a youngster), I preferred this film over its bigger and bolder sequel, simply because people actually died and I felt that the T-800 of T2 was neutered. That's a borderline disturbing thought process for an 11-year-old, but my opinion stands, albeit for more legitimate reasons: I feel that T2, superb, inexplicably affecting epic though it is, lacks the gripping edge of its predecessor. The Terminator is one of the most effective thrillers ever made, with expert lighting, direction, acting, pacing and music. What a shame that more recent installments forgot what made this story so compelling.

Johnny Handsome

Walter Hill's Johnny Handsome has so much going for it that I just can't fault it when it trips ten feet from the finish line and wretchedly crawls across the finish line. It's both his and Mickey Rourke's last film of the 80s, and a sort of last gasp for the both of them, though Rourke finally climbed back on top with Sin City and of course The Wrestler. Rourke alone should alert you to the necessity to watch this film regardless of its overall quality, as the man quite simply walked away with the 80s as far as I'm concerned.

Rourke stars as the titular character (née Johnny Sedley), a small-time career criminal who ends up on the bad side of a botched heist and spends the rest of the film plotting his revenge against the people who sold him out. He got his nickname due to the horrible facial disfigurement he's suffered since birth, scars that both swell his head and force him to speak with a lisp. Later in the film, Johnny recounts how, as a child, a young boy ripped off his jack-o-lantern mask on Halloween and said "Johnny don't need no mask," and Johnny responded by beating the poor kid senseless. Rourke brings all his tortured soul to the part, and only makes this creature even more wretched and pitiable.

An older man named Mikey looks after Johnny and includes him in his robberies. For a particularly big heist, Mikey recruits the help of two pieces of street trash, Sunny and Rafe (Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen, both of whom play just about the best scumbags you could ever hope to find) in order to pull things off successfully. The robbery goes bad, and Rafe ends up killing Mikey, while Johnny gets captured and sent to prison.

While there, a Lt. Drones (Morgan Freeman) mocks him and his looks but, after an inmate stabbing leaves Johnny in the hospital, a doctor (Forest Whitaker) takes pity on the man. Believing that Johnny's life choices are the direct result of the shame he feels from his disfigurement, he offers to reconstruct Johnny's face and to hire a speech pathologist to rid him of his lisp in order to provide a fresh start. After a few weeks of painful surgeries, we see Mickey Rourke's beautiful face freed from all those prosthetics.

Soon Johnny gets paroled and finds a job and even starts going out with a girl who loves him (Elizabeth McGovern), but there's only one thing on his mind. Drones correctly guesses that Sunny and Rafe would never recognize the new Johnny, and sure enough he hatches a plan to win the couple's trust with another robbery that would get him close to his foes. He even toys with them at first to make sure they don't see it coming; "There's something familiar about him," wonders Sunny after Johnny tells the two that he knows them.

For such a short film, it plays out with a great deal of tension and suspense. Until the ending that is. I won't give it away, but some characters suddenly get smart while others don't think at all, and the short length suddenly becomes very, very apparent. The film runs barely over 90 minutes, and the final bit unfolds after an hour and a half has passed. I can't really say why the ending doesn't stick with me other than the fact that it seems to thoroughly clichéd as to be interchangeable with any number of "guys trying to break out of lives of crime" stories. Hell, Mickey Rourke himself built his career in the 80s on films that had endings too similar to this.

Nevertheless, the film remains a must-see on the basis of its fantastic opening heist sequence and the acting performances of Barkin, Henriksen and Rourke. Rourke in particular knocks it right out of the park; he puts so much pain into the role that it breaks through even the prosthetics and only magnifies on his actual face. I think the film was written with any actor in mind, but when Rourke took the part and made it his own suddenly the short running time became noticeable. For my money, his portrayal here is in his top five performances, and for that reason alone you should track this above-average piece of 80s noir down; I believe the DVD is being reissued soon anyway, so you're in luck.