A Young Stanley Kubrick Self Portrait
I haven’t seen every film by Stanley Kubrick and something tells me that I should have. So I’m going to, with a little help from some friends.
As it happens this Christmas I found myself finally owning every film the man has ever done (with one forgivable exception, more of which later). So I’m going to watch the lot, in the order of their release, and write a little review. Why bother writing a review though? I want to make it more interesting, so I’m going to try and invite some other folks to have a go at writing their own thoughts about some of the films. Mainly I’ll be tapping up fellow film expert and superb writer Nathan Ditum, who occasionally expresses his own views on his Film Forum blog. Hopefully we can spur on a dialogue and draw out some more interesting ideas rather than just having me pontificating on my own.
So what about Stanley Kubrick, what films are we including here, here is the list starting with the earliest I own…
- Killer’s Kiss (1955)
- The Killing (1956)
- Paths of Glory (1957)
- Spartacus (1960)
- Lolita (1962)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A Clockwork Orange (1971)
- Barry Lyndon (1975)
- The Shining (1980)
- Full Metal Jacket (1987)
- Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
There’s an earlier feature length Kubrick called ‘Fear and Desire’ but apparently he hated it and disowned it completely so I won’t bother. I’ll start with Killer’s Kiss…
T'was re-named The Conqueror Worm in America.
Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)
Brutal, sadistic, bloody and very very cheap, Witchfinder General was the fourth and final film made by the young and exciting Michael Reeves. The film concerns a fictional account of the activities of Matthew Hopkins, authorised in the film by Cromwell to smoke out any witches that may be operating in the country. Along with his brutal aide, John Stearne, he travels from village to village accusing people of witchcraft before having his assistant ‘extract’ a confession. It’s an interestingly cruel presentation of violence and misogyny and Vincent Price as Hopkins is inspired casting. As his lip curls and that tell-tale voice slithers out proclaiming that he is ‘Here to do God’s work my child’ there’s nothing camp here. Instead we get only the sinister look into the sadistic and perverted eyes of man with a mandate for cruelty.
Jaunty angle - grim face.
What makes this film folk horror then? Well, unlike many of the other films I’ll be looking at, this one is a steadfastly anti-supernatural. Really it doesn’t actually present any of the pagan activity that other films tend to revolve around. Hopkins is persecuting supposed witches but the film merely presents the victims as falsely accused people at the hands of a maniacal killer. The setting and locations chime with the likes of Blood on Satan’s Claw and there’s some lovely puritan outfits on display but let’s get to the details.
Signifiers:
Here’s my scientifically lacking pursuit of cataloguing the things which make something folk horror.
- Witchfinder General is a grubby little film, full of grime and dirt and a particularly nasty bit of rape in a field. There’s also plenty of greenery and vegetation dotted around but it looks curiously pale, like Reeves drained the colour out of the film stock. Or, more likely, it was cheap film.
- Bizarrely the religious friction in Witchfinder is its weakest link to folk horror. It isn’t playing the church against the malign influences of an older and more pagan religion. Instead Cromwell’s puritan warrior is actively pursuing an anti-papist agenda, hence the reason the priest gets it pretty early on. The false pretence of paganism is invoked but that’s all.
- Burning isn’t going to be missed in a film about witches. There’s even a cracking scene where some peasants have cooked their potatoes in the embers of a burnt ‘witch’. Brutal stuff.
- The only procession in the film occurs when the suspected witches are being led to the bridge for the drowning test, you know the one – where it’s remarkably difficult to live given the criteria.
- Flowing white robes/dresses Well the priest wears them, obviously, but there’s also a disrobing scene where Hopkins has his way with the priest’s niece.
- The Catholic church is reduced to ruins in the wake of the priest’s death.
- There’s some form of torture cropping up in the film quite a lot. Extracting them ‘confessions’ you see.
- Whilst it isn’t quite as pronounced as it is in the other films there are plenty of isolated communities at play here. Especially the town where the priest is tortured and killed.
Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971)
I’ve become a bit obsessed with ‘folk horror’ recently, especially since I wrote about it in my recent post. So I thought I might watch and review some of it, looking specifically to dig out the signifiers of folk horror (flowers, masks, blood rituals etc) and look at some of the crucial themes of the genre like the religious frictions, the use of ruins and ancient stones as places of worship/sacrifice and an obsession with the land. I’ll be doing some reviews of the main films in the movement as well as some of the TV stuff too.
So, Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw – watched on the advice of Mark Gatiss – is the last of the big three folk horror films that I hadn’t seen (I’ll revisit the others to do smaller reviews). 17th Century rural England, somewhere about the home counties, a young farmer turns something up with his plough. It’s remains, neither human nor animal. His discovery predicates some very strange goings on in the village as Satan himself, or ‘the fiend’ as they call him, walks among them corrupting the young, especially the girls. What’s he up to? Why, rebuilding himself from the skin of the children of course. It’s a labour intensive practise that involves a bit of ritualised blind man’s buff, a pinch of rape and some bloody big scissors.
Foot and Mouth and Deformed Skull Discovery
This is resolutely folk horror, no hint of anything else in there really, Witchfinder General has something of the revenge thriller and The Wicker Man is a detective story (at least to begin with). No, Blood… is quite pure in its crystallisation of the sub-genre and for my money a bloody good film too. That is if, and this is quite a big if for some people, you can look past the creature effects. Nothing dates a film quite as much as dodgy creature effects and the dark lord looks, sadly, fairly dated now. But that shit don’t bother me none whatsoever, no sir. Because I was loving the whole feeling, the primal simplicity of the whole thing – stripping the British countryside back to something dangerous, fearful and full of fertile promise. The film is brimming with a kind of raw and rural sexuality and it successfully taps into the vein exposed by Hammer for lacing horror with a bit of nudity.
Boy bands have moved on since the 17th Century
So what makes it folk horror? Well let’s start with the obvious parts, the setting (time and place) and the characters strike a familiar chord. The country was a god-fearing place in the 17th Century but superstition of devils and demons still held sway, especially in rural areas. As with almost any British film you get a lovely broad swathe of the class system involved too. It should be noted that being poor means you are much more likely to be killed, possessed or enchanted into becoming a follower/acolyte. Perhaps it’s because we’re much more likely to believe poor people are stupid or inherently evil. Certainly the first person to be affected has already been maligned for being ‘a farmer’s daughter’ yet when the noble chap she was betrothed to encounters the same force he is capable of lopping off his demonically possessed hand, Evil Dead style. So whilst the teens from the village are hell-bent on serving the dark master it falls to the ‘Judge’ to bring the Lord’s vengeance over from London.
She went out with Robin Askwith. Why?
Signifiers:
Here’s where I try and list the things that make something a bit ‘folk horror’.
- More so than any of the other folk horror films I’ve seen this film is seriously rooted in the earth, with the camera positioned low in the dirt and often climbing through the undergrowth. Shots seem to be happily positioned with characters obscured by greenery and vegetation.
- Religious friction, this is a slightly more straightforward conflict than some of the other films – it’s just Christianity and forces of God against those of Satan. Satan does seem to have co-opted a fairly pagan bunch of rituals though. Perhaps this is some kind of comment on the land belonging to ol’ Nick prior to the civilising force of God, suggesting that druidic/pagan activities were tantamount devil worship? Either way, it’s present and pretty much to the fore.
- The events are precipitated by the unearthed object, a recurring folk horror symbol.
- Long white dresses/robes, plenty here including lovel Lynda Hayden disrobing from one to tempt the local priest.
- Burning, it ain’t folk horror unless some folk are getting barbecued. This occurs at the end, though it isn’t an innocent this time.
- Flowers, it could have gone up with vegetation but I reckon the flower crowns and adornments can have their own mention, linking up with the small clutch of what looked like hawthorn held by the girl who first falls prey to possession.
- When dealing with pagan rituals I always find it helps events go quite nicely if you have a procession. There’s one here leading up to a nasty bit of rape and it manages to get some flowing white robes in as well as floral crowns. Lovely stuff.
- It would be remiss not to mention the presence of some ruins. Most of the meaty action in the film takes place in a ruined church which is lovely and apt.
Last year Mark Gatiss made a wonderful 3 part documentary about his love of horror films called ‘A History of Horror’. Interestingly I think it would probably be better served if it was called ‘My History…’ because it is such a personal series of programs exploring his fascination with the macabre and murderous world of the horror film. At one point Gatiss explores the theory that there is a curious sub-genre of British horror film, comprising only three films and featuring something layered deep within the British psyche. Calling this crop of films ‘folk horror’ he picked out The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General and proceeded to explain how their engagement with the nature of paganism and a kind of earthen ancient spirituality seemed to dredge up something unique for our isles, a special kind of fear. Gatiss highlights the scarcely seen Blood on Satan’s Claw (the extract is here on YouTube) and in his exploration with director Piers Haggard he focuses on the notion of something being innate in our soil – in the land itself. The notion that buried somewhere in the earth beneath our feet is a portion of our blood-soaked history is a powerful one indeed and one that might go further than these three films and occur in certain other parts of our sparkling horror history.
Blood on Satan's Claw: Insert your own eye based pun.
I like this idea of something ancient and innate, it sounds vaguely Lovecraftian in some respects, the notion of something so primal it defies our understanding and has a unique and incomprehensible power over us. It reminded me immediately of a television play a friend of mine had managed to find a recording of for us to watch. It’s called The Stone Tape (the entirety of which is available on that there YouTube) and was written by Quatermass legend Nigel Kneale. In it a team of scientists discover a room that appears to be haunted in an old stately mansion they are working in. They begin experimenting and find that the haunting is actually a form of recording in one of the ancient stone foundation walls, a recording of a woman screaming and falling. It looks dated but there’s no escaping the chilling nature of the story and the idea that you can imprint something so strongly into the earth that surrounds us seems too similar to be a coincidence. I know Mark Gatiss is a fan of Nigel Kneale so I’d love to know what he thinks about the tenuous connection, whether he’d considered any similarities between this TV classic and his ‘Folk Horror’ films. Not that I would include The Stone Tape alongside those films, it’s too different and contains little of the religious friction that powers those classics.
Jane Asher has one hell of a bad cake in The Stone Tape
I liked the idea of ‘Folk Horror’ so much that I started to see it more often, in fact I’d make a damn strong case for including Christopher Smith’s excellent film Black Death in with the select cadre. The Sean Bean starrer had all of the elements required, it’s set in the rural middle ages (earlier than the other films admittedly) with the rivalry between Christian religion and pagan activities at the forefront just as with Gatiss’ trio. It managed, excellently, to keep you guessing about the supernatural elements right to the end and was mean and brutal throughout. I can’t really see any cause for keeping it out of the list. If that’s the case maybe we can go ahead and start to include some other films too or at least look for elements of films that seem similar or informed by our collective connection to this druidic pagan past.
Sean experiences how I felt watching When Saturday Comes
This brings me to a film I was lucky enough to see at an advance screening recently, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. What’s most striking about the film is that it isn’t really horror; at least those elements are scant until about half way through the film where the hints and clues dropped in the first half start to coalesce. It is to the strength of the narrative that it never saw fit to fully explain what is happening at any point, even when the characters themselves are demanding answers none are forthcoming. But toward the end (and I’m being extremely careful about spoilers here) it positions itself as something special, something that elevates itself to the playing field of our new ‘Folk Horror’ canon. When I questioned Wheatley about this at the Q&A session, asking if he felt it fell in to this sub-genre of Gatiss’ creation, he said it was absolutely a fascination of his that every inch of our island was soaked in blood, that it had been fought over so much that something lingered in the land. His answer harked back again to the inescapable, the recorded in the land, in the earth, in the rural backdrop that serves as Kill List’s final setting and that features so heavily in all the other films.
Kill List: Wiccan Weird
Yes, I like this new classification of a sub-genre and I want to see more made of it. I don’t have the time for a full academic breakdown of its signifiers and such but I think I’ll be keeping track of what pops out of the ground in the near future with an eye on the pagan and the puritan. Just keep your eyes peeled for any odd woodland rituals, processions, tortured confessions, wicker constructs, naked dancing and such.
Welcome to part two of my needlessly lengthy attempt to tell you why you shouldn’t be so angry about the remakes.
“Well what about foreign films?” I hear you demanding like the voices in my mind that scream in the night. People always get very angry about remakes of foreign films, especially recent foreign films (and by foreign I’m referring to foreign language for the purposes of this article). During the release of Matt Reeves’ Let Me In I mounted a defence of remaking foreign films on my, sadly defunct, podcast and it prompted someone to leave the following scathing review on iTunes…
“Since the podcast where they defended Hollywood movie remakes I’ve lost respect for them. There is no reason to remake a film ever!! Learn to read and watch the original in it’s own language. Retards.”
Evidently what we have here is failure to communicate. I’ll not justify the comment by addressing this fool specifically but there are issues he raises that are common to the debate and he serves quite well as an example of the anonymous idiocy of the internet (the punctuation error is his own).
Yul Brynner had an interesting way of dealing with internet commenters
There are many reasons to remake foreign films, most of which I’ve detailed in my previous post but we’re coming to the delicate matter of nationalities and foreign properties. English speaking audiences (the only ones I’m broadly qualified to comment on) don’t really take to subtitled films. It is initially jarring watching a subtitled film and for people who don’t read particularly quickly it can be annoying.
Unfortunately there is a sort of popular snobbery about subtitles though – they are the ‘best’ way to watch foreign cinema. I don’t mind them, I honestly prefer them to the possibility of a distracting dub track. But for some they are too much of a turn off, I happen to work with some people with learning difficulties and subtitles are often a complete no-no. So who am I to tell those people that watching the film any other way is some form of cinematic heresy, that’s right, I’m very well qualified to do so – but I won’t, because I’m really nice like that. Anyway, anyone that says you shouldn’t remake foreign films should be forced to watch The Magnificent Seven (remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai) on a loop until they repent from their ill-thought statement. Because I’ll take a hundred shit films that I’m under no obligation to watch if I can have that classic Western on the telly on a Sunday.
Rain. Kurosawa. Class.
So if you are presented with an audience who won’t watch a subtitled film (bar very occasional exceptions like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) for whatever reason why not remake the film? Well I think there might be two reasons for that, one is that people think a remake somehow invalidates an original, or besmirches it. I’ll get to why that is a load of nonsense in a moment. The other can be dealt with relatively swiftly but with a painful message, like ripping off a plaster, so brace yourself.
Unless you are a fabulously rich individual the likelihood is that you don’t own a film. Now, I don’t mean that I’ve been round with a lighter and burned all your DVDs, I mean you don’t own the rights, the intellectual property or the original celluloid strips on which a film was made. You don’t have any ownership over that film other than the emotional connection you’ve made with it. It doesn’t matter how many Star Wars bedspreads you buy, George Lucas is still going to be the one making the cash from humping the fetid corpse of the original time and time again. So please, pretty please with a cherry on top – stop being so damn precious about their future. The original will exist, don’t worry. Although, ironically, in George Lucas’ case he will probably retcon it and then refuse to release it in its original form so maybe the analogy doesn’t work for Star Wars. But you get the point.
YOU DON'T OWN IT. It's his, y'know, the guy with no neck.
Now, I cannot fathom the idea that remaking a film somehow destroys the integrity of the original property. I’ve seen both versions of The Thing (Carpenter and Hawks) and will probably give the upcoming version a watch too. I’m quietly confident that regardless of the outcome of the new version, be it Kubrickian high art or Paul WS Anderson levels of piss-poor, I’ll still really enjoy watching Kurt Russell get his beard all icy.
I’ve seen both versions of Scarface, Dawn of the Dead, The Fly, Ocean’s 11 and any other number of decent properties and I’ve managed to parse them in my brain. I’ve managed to keep them separate and not mind meshed them into one super-film of varying quality. Equally I’ve watched both versions of Rollerball (see my review of the atrocious remake here) and managed in no uncertain terms to retain two very different opinions on them. The argument that a remake devalues an original is bunkum, poor films are forgotten and good films are remembered.
Kurt? C'mon Kurt. We promise it'll be better than the Rollerball remake. Promise.
It’s time to wrap up this crazily overwrought blogpost with the reasons that remakes are actually quite good. You see, instead of being a precious arsehole who looks like you are about to take a wisdom shit on someone when they mention the latest remake with your classic ‘Well actually I think you’ll find that was originally made in…’ you can watch the remake and perhaps even discuss why it’s better/worse than the original. That way less people will think you’re a know-it-all prick. Trust me on this, I learnt the hard way. That’s perhaps the most interesting thing about remakes, they often serve to highlight what was negative or positive about the originals. As far as I’m concerned a dreadful remake only serves to reinforce how good the original was and, additionally, draws attention to the original – often introducing it to a completely new audience.
So when you look at the listings and see a flood of remakes don’t get too upset. Just try to remember that there’s a difference between the likes of David Fincher remaking The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Sly Stallone’s involvement in Get Carter. And try to remember that the Hollywood machine will always be remaking stuff, all that changes is how angry you are about it – and why bother being angry. I find it much more fun to be calculatingly mean about the bad ones and sing the praises of the good.
You know the drill, news comes in of a remake that is occurring in Hollywoodland and someone is talking about it and they start to get angry. They will undoubtedly say the something along the lines of the following…
‘Why are they doing another remake? What is the point? This will ruin the other one. Why can’t people just watch the original? Haven’t they got any original ideas?’
If it’s a foreign film you can usually tack on the classic ‘Why don’t people just learn to read subtitles? Why don’t people watch foreign films?’
What you’ll probably notice is that people get absolutely furious about remakes. I once witnessed a co-worker explode in fury when she learnt that The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three was being remade with John Travolta and Denzel Washington. It did her mood no good at all when I tried to calm her down by telling her it had already been remade before with Donnie Wahlberg. Never mind eh?
Donnie 'The Real Slim Shady' Wahlberg in The Taking of Pelham 123 TV Movie
This is a cheeky little attempt to tell you not to get too uptight about it, don’t worry too much. Why not try to enjoy the remakes, see them for what they are rather than looking at each announcement as a fresh assault on your childhood memories. To do that let’s help you answer some of the questions you might find yourself asking, or indeed find others asking, every time a remake is announced.
We should start with the originality argument. Why isn’t Hollywood original anymore? Well the answer is twofold. Firstly, it never was. Sure there were original films , there still are believe it or not, but remakes have been happening since day one. The first mainstream fiction narrative feature is widely accepted to be the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, at 12 minutes it’s worth a watch as a slice of history so here’s a YouTube link, have a look see. It was directed and filmed by Edwin Porter for the proto-studio ‘Edison Manufacturing Company’. One year later the remake was out, near identical and apparently inferior, from a rival company. I don’t know if it still exists (so much is lost from that time) but here’s the IMDB link. Porter even remade it as a parody in 1905 with an all child cast and called it The Little Train Robbery.
George was pissed off that the colour tinting was the wrong shade of pink
‘Ha’, you might say, ‘that isn’t Hollywood!’ No it isn’t, these were early entrepreneurs out to make a quick bit of money experimenting in the new format. But if you want early Hollywood examples I’ve got them too. The biggest grossing film (as best we know) from 1920 is legendary director D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East. It was a smash hit, grossing millions from a, then enormous, budget of $700,000 and further cementing Griffith as the director and his silent leading lady Lillian Gish as the doyenne of the day. But it was also a remake. In fact Way Down East was originally a play that had been adapted for cinema twice already, in 1908 and 1914. Never one to let a good thing go, after the advent of sound, Hollywood had another bite at the cherry in 1935 with Henry Fonda in the lead. This is just the nature of the beast, Hollywood loves a remake. Back in days of yore, whilst studying Warner Bros. for a unit on ‘History of Hollywood’ at university, I looked at the release slate for the 1930s and I noticed Gold Diggers of 1933 was followed by Gold Diggers of 1935, Gold Diggers of 1937 and Gold Diggers of Paris (1938). All three were sort-of sequel remakes sometimes featuring similar cast members and they just reworked stories of dancing girls (the ‘gold diggers’ of the title) who fall in love with rich fellas. But it gets better, they were all sequel/remakes of Warner Bros. 1929 film Gold Diggers of Broadway most of which has been lost or destroyed. A shame because now we’ll never know exactly how similar it was to Warner Bros. 1923 film based on the same play and called, you may have guessed it (or fallen asleep), The Gold Diggers. Hopefully that sort of proves that Hollywood has always been at it in one form or another and dispels the argument that Tinseltown is suddenly bereft of creativity, those movie makers are smart and they will follow the money as far as it goes.
Get down girl, go 'head get down
‘Woah,’ you say, ‘thanks for the history lesson Grandad. That doesn’t explain why there’s so many remakes now. Why are we swimming in regurgitated crap of old TV series and foreign thrillers now?’ Well I’m getting that you ingrate and to do that we’ll need to play a role playing game. You are Johnny Greenlight, big-shot movie executive with Shit-for-Brains Studios. You have a big responsibility sunshine, you are the guy that decides which films on your slate are going to get made. That means you are the guy who is deciding which creative property your massive billion dollar corporation is hoisting up the mast and unfailingly saluting to for the next year or two. If you’re lucky (like Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings lucky) for the next decade. Your career rests on the choices you make, so for the best career you need to pick hits, you need to minimise the chance that the film you pick is the next Cutthroat Island and hope instead that you’re giving the thumbs up to the next Bourne Identity (did you know The Bourne Identity is a remake?). How do you do that? You look at something that has already worked and one of your options is remaking a film that people already liked. You see, it isn’t just your career on the line here. You’ve seen the list of credits on a film right? Every one of those people will be associated with that film from that point onwards. It will represent up to 6 months of their working lives, it’s going to stick out on your CV. In other words, get it right. So when you stumble across the fact that your studio owns the option on a Scandinavian thriller book that has already been made into a film which was a success on the festival circuit with glowing reviews you have on your hands a minimised risk property. The likelihood that you can shunt out a successful movie has increased, however marginally. So when it doesn’t exactly pull in mega dollars you can explain to your boss, ‘Hey, this worked before so the reason it didn’t work again is nothing to do with me. I’ll bet it was the fucking writer’s fault!’ (If in doubt, pin it on the writer.) So there you go, there’s a bloke (invariably male) in a room somewhere frantically trying to second guess the population of America by guessing what it is that they want to watch on their Saturday afternoon. You can’t really blame him for saying ‘What we need is another version of The Thing, people love that shit! We can do a prequel!’ That noise in the distance is the internet exploding in indignation. But pedants beware, John Carpenter’s The Thing is amazing but it is itself is a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 film The Thing from Another World. So why not give it another go, people loved both the previous versions? With the amount of money the average Hollywood films costs ballooning year on year the pressure to safeguard your profitability increases with it. I’m not saying it’s a great situation, I’m just explaining why it’s happening. So next time you are all upset, or someone asks why they opt for remakes just ask them to play the Johnny Greenlight game because that guy is under a lot of pressure.
"They're remaking 'The Thing', Kurt. Kurt? Kurt are you ok chap?"
And that concludes part one of ‘The Remake Manifesto’. An accidental diatribe on why you shouldn’t get too angry about remakes.
Way back in the mists of time, August 2005 to be precise, I went to the local multiplex to catch a couple of films. An odd pair they were with very little in common between them, until I started to think about them a bit more. Recently I have been rolling the two films over in my head and trying to make some sense of the similarities and differences I could see and what they might mean, if anything.
What are these two films? First up there is The Dukes of Hazzard directed by Jay Chandresekhar. This is a major studio update of the 70s/80s TV show with the curious topline cast of Johnny Knoxville, Sean William Scott and Jessica Simpson. They are a bizarre little family unit (brothers/sister) made up of professional prankster, a gross-out comedy star and a pop star. The Duke’s (Luke, Bo and Daisy respectively) set about protecting their hometown way of life down in the deep south from some renegade authority figures (Boss Hog and Sherriff Rosco P. Coltrane) who notionally have the law on their side and are intending to strip mine the county. It matters little that their way of life is trading in illegal moonshine as a way of earning money. Why? Because them’s some ‘Good Ol’ Boys! They do most of this inside a classic all-american muscle car which they occasionally race. Lovely.
The other film is Rob Zombie’s horror sequel The Devil’s Rejects. This is a LGF (Lions Gate Films) release and a sequel to his earlier, larger budget, haunted house film House of 1000 Corpses with a cast of relative unknowns. The Firefly family is made up of micro budget character actor Sid Haig as the unconventional father figure Captain Spaulding, cult hero Bill Moseley is unhinged brother Otis and rock’n’roll fashion designer Sherri Moon Zombie is Baby. The family is on the run after the law have torn their house apart in the opening scenes. On the run from people who, in essence, don’t agree with their way of life though that way of life does involve breaking the law in fairly extreme ways. Torture, murder, gun-rape and occasionally making someone wear their boyfriend’s face as a mask. They are on the run from the renegade arm of the law, Sherriff John Quincy Wydell, in a classic soft-top American Cadillac. Delightful.
Whilst one cribs from a much loved television show which soft-focused the criminal elements of the family and played up the comedy anarchic aspects of the loveable rogues the other lifts from the dark underbelly of the South on screen. Zombie takes his cues from 70s exploitation cinema and drags them through the road movie prism. One offers safe thrills and spills where the villains are comically inept and the heroes are cheeky scamps with zany madcap plans. The other ventures into deeper, darker waters where it forces you to watch the family unit do some terrible things before they themselves are subjected to some pretty extreme violence – forcing you to feel sympathy for them, forcing you onside with the murderers and psychos.
So there are a few surface similarities, so what? Well I think it is interesting that two radically different portrayals of Southern stereotypes are on offer. The South is fertile ground for Hollywood and Rich Hall made a marvellous documentary about this very subject. It’s a playground of near lawlessness, sweat, sex and violence in the eyes of film-makers. But it also offers a window to something that seems, to me at least, to be a little primal in American cultural memory. The South seems like the kind of place where the law can’t tell you how to live your life, placing your film there is like wrapping your characters in a cloak of rebel chic. Here is a place where authority is impinging on that most important of American ideas, freedom. Sure, in the case of the Firefly clan, that might be the freedom to torture and kill people and for the Duke’s the right to brew and distribute liver obliterating moonshine. But come on, they were just getting creative in their own special ways, trying to grab a slice of that American dream, or face in Otis’ case.
But the South has a difficult history, a history bound in chains and forced to work, a history at odds with the concept of freedom for all. So how do you manage to appease any watching liberals? Make sure your characters are ignorant of any such past. Witness Luke and Bo driving into central Atlanta in the General Lee, replete with confederate flag, when they are abused by people accusing them of being ‘late for your Klan meeting’. They don’t understand the reference or, more importantly, the inference. Brilliant, innocence through ignorance. Very smart. It’s a cheap little screenwriting trick, dumb down your characters, stupid people aren’t offensive – they’re funny! Race relations aren’t a factor in The Devil’s Rejects though. The film is, essentially, colourblind in that respect. Rob Zombie’s South does have black and Hispanic people in it, it’s just not a facet of their character. Critics might point out that Ken Foree is playing a pimp and Danny Trejo a hired killer but that puts them relatively high up the social respectability ladder in the film.
The Devil’s Rejects is an exceptional film, the making of documentary (longer than the film itself) is a focused and deep investigation of the process of making the film on a relative shoestring and with a ridiculous time limit. Like the film it is documenting it is an excavation, prepared to turf up the dirt and peer into the mire. By contrast The Dukes of Hazzard has some out-takes over the credits where Joe Don Baker makes a joke about Jessica Simpson’s tits and Sean William Scott stifles a laugh. Y’know, sexism but sorta safe, cos they jus’ some good ol’ boys…
A couple of weeks ago I stayed with a friend of inestimable hospitality (@MGElliott) in the picturesque spa town (City, apparently) of Bath. He asked if I minded watching The Proposition, a film I reviewed on here some time ago. We sat down alongside Matt’s equally generous girlfriend Kim (@nanosounds) to settle into the sweat soaked Australian outback, peopled with all manner of parched violent degenerates and desperate ex-pats (how little has changed). It was whilst watching that I was struck by the use of fencing in the film (shut up), and the way I’d seen fences and land demarcation used in other Australian cinema before. You see, land and land ownership is a terrifically important and evocative subject in Australian life, it is in danger of becoming the very thing that defines them as a people. If you fancy finding out why then have a read up on the Mabo case and you might want to understand what ‘terra nullius’ means too.
Fences then, what do fences really mean in cinema? In the case of most classical interpretations they denote ownership in one format or another. In the case of our Western view of the world a fence is an effective way of marking territory, showing what is ours in a very physical and demonstrable way. We know that by crossing a fence we are entering someone’s land, we are stepping onto their territory, either at their invitation or not it’s pretty important stuff. Were I American I might interpret someone crossing that threshold uninvited as an opportunity to fill you with lead for impinging on my freedoms. Well, why are these fences so important in Australia? And why in The Proposition? Ray Winstone’s grizzled and distraught Captain Stanley is the key.
Captain Stanley continually re-iterates his desire to ‘civilise’ the land he has found himself in, this barren and inhospitable terrain we now call Australia. How does he do this? Well first of all he wants to round up all the criminals and cleanse the land of their infection. Stanley makes the classic interpretation of the land, it is a void – a void rapidly filling with undesirable elements that he is a barrier against and he is the spearhead of a civilising force attempting to tame the wild land and the wild folk who tread upon it. But the core of Stanley’s character is his home, a place we are told that he rarely visits and one that is surrounded by a fence. A rudimentary fence granted but one that is there, almost pointlessly given the lack of other houses. Stanley’s house stands alone in the landscape, the fence almost looks like it isn’t there to keep people out but to keep the rest of the landscape out. In parts the fence even looks like a white picket job, the most evocative of all civilising forces. The white picket fence embodies the desire for suburban, civilised and, most importantly, normal Western life.
Inside the fence is Stanley’s wife and a house and garden that appears to have been plucked out of middle England and placed inside a dust bowl. No one else is around for miles, just the desert and the dust. Stanley is civilising the land, one parcel at a time and it starts with his house, filled with bone china, doilies and all the upper middle class chintz you could ask for. Even Emily Watson, as Stanley’s long-suffering wife Martha, is a porcelain relic of the homeland. Her white skin and delicate manners stand at odds with every other character in the film, Stanley’s desire to protect her innocence is obvious and, given who he works with, understandable. When she braves the town to see her husband she resembles a delicate piece of pristine Lladro thrown into a particularly dusty and decrepit pawn shop by mistake.
This is the Australian conundrum in microcosm. Here is this land, originally populated by people who did not entertain the notion of owning the earth they walked on. The earth is always going to be there, they are not. When you put it into that context what a ludicrous thought it is that we can ever really ‘own’ land. You are merely its temporary visitors. Brief custodians of the dust. So how does The Proposition show us this? Stanley is sick, he has been overwhelmed by the task at hand, the vastness of the country and the seeming futility of his civilising mission. In the final scenes Danny Huston’s violent philosophising Arthur Burns invades Stanley’s home during Christmas dinner. Arthur has gone off the deep end. He’s been overwhelmed by the land and eventually seems to want to adopt the objective morality of the dust, he cares little for others, he knows no empathy – he is the latest in a long line of Aussie cinema psychopaths all snarl and pseudo intellectual charm leaving shattered bodies in their wake (see also The Boys, Wake in Fright, The Plumber, Mad Max, Chopper, Romper Stomper – I could go on). He appears in the room without warning, as if he rises out of the dust and goes in for a good rape and pillage. Stanley is helpless, paralysed as he has been for most of the film caught between a desire to fill the abyss and its inescapable gaze back into his soul. Martha is taken, she’s also frozen stuck in an alien land all the defences are shredded when the men enter the room. You can build a civilisation on it, but the land is still there and your petty fences mean nothing to it. Look at the picture below, where the aboriginal servant employed by Stanley has left to go home for the evening he leaves his shoes inside the fence, understanding that this parcel of civilisation is just that – a parcel. The rest of the country is as it has been for centuries and there’s never been a need for excesses like shoes before.
****************The next paragraph gets a bit spoilery******************
So what of the fence? After Arthur is shot by his brother in the Stanley house he stumbles outside and barrels through the fence. It offers no protection, Arthur has given himself over to the dust and simply doesn’t see the fence as a meaningful object. It is an object of Western-ness that doesn’t belong on this land. It doesn’t belong because the land can’t be owned, it owns people. It fries Stanley as he attempts to yoke it and subsumes Arthur when he gives in to it. The land wins here, you can’t own it, but it can destroy you. It is surely some form of terrible irony that in The Proposition the land truly is Terra Nullius, it is an aggressive un-owned land that rejects ownership and annihilates those who choose to defy it.
But what about other fences in Aussie films? The most famous is probably the titular cross country edifice in Philip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence, another futile attempt to divide the outback married to a story about the futility of trying to maintain a perfect racial divide. How about Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior? The final desperate attempts to cling to the oil that greases the wheels of civilisation in a refinery ringed by an armoured barrier cobbled from the relics of society, with a bus for a door. The land has endured and civilisation has fallen. Chaos is hammering at the fence and hope is, like oil, in short supply. I’m sure there’s more, it’s just that this was only going to be a couple of hundred words and now it’s a short essay about fences in films. Which anyone might think were a dull subject, but they’d be wrong.
The Shock Doctrine (Mat Whitecross & Michael Winterbottom, 2009)
Last year I reviewed The Shock Doctrine, a documentary I found fascinating and moving as well as extremely saddening in parts. It is now available legally on Youtube. I recommend it unconditionally to anyone and everone. Watch it with an open and critical mind, decide for yourself if you agree. It is a brilliant thesis or a dreadful misappropriation of the truth depending on your point of view. I may lean to the former but I implore you to look for yourself and see if you agree.
Watch it HERE.
(I can’t embed it because 4OD won’t let me)
24. The Crazies (Breck Eisner, 2010)
A remake of the little known George A. Romero film from the early 70s, this is a pretty entertaining slice of small-town America gone awry. Ogden Marsh is the town in question and it is, all of a sudden, subject to some very strange goings on. People are starting to act very in very strange, violent and dangerous ways and it is up to the town Sheriff to see if he can figure it out. That would ordinarily be the set up and resolution for a film of this kind but credit where it is due because this film moves at breakneck speed. There’s no bedding in period for this small town, you get all the information within five minutes and there is a simple and highly effective scene on the local baseball field which kicks off the action. Everything proceeds with some hast from that point on and that’s what allows the film to take several turns I wasn’t expecting. I won’t spoil it but after about half an hour the film has rattled through the story that a regular small town horror film would take for its duration. The Crazies doesn’t do much wrong, but it doesn’t really do anything spectacular it is just a really solid piece of entertainment that is well filmed and well worth 90 minutes of your Friday night. Special mention to English actor Joe Anderson as the deputy, upstaging his American counterparts with a damn good performance.