MOVIES MADE ME #4: THE TIME MACHINE

I saw THE TIME MACHINE for the first time in my 7th grade Social Studies class, complete with introduction by Mr. Dexter Jackson – the only 7th grade Social Studies teacher on Earth who could make plaid shirts and polka dot ties look cool. To this day, I’m still not sure why he showed us that film. At the end, we had to write a short essay about which three books we would have taken back to the world of the Eloi… but as far as I could tell, this had nothing to do with his curriculum. Maybe he just needed a break so that he could catch up on grading papers. Whatever the case, no one was complaining. Movies are always more popular than lectures.

I have to admit that I wasn’t sold on THE TIME MACHINE right away. The first twenty minutes or so consisted mostly of drawing room conversation, and I couldn’t help comparing these sequences to the comparatively fast-paced BACK TO THE FUTURE. (Nevermind that BACK TO THE FUTURE takes the science out of science fiction.) George Pal’s pinwheel sled device may not be as cool-looking as a nuclear DeLorean, but – once it gets going – Rod Taylor’s trip was much more daring. He didn’t just go back a few decades and hit on his mother, he went eight hundred centuries into the future and picked up Yvette Mimieux. Now that’s time-traveling! Also, there's something about George Pal's time-lapsed photography that is far more hypnotic than all of Robert Zemeckis's higher-tech fireworks.

When I re-watched THE TIME MACHINE a few nights ago, it reminded me less of BACK TO THE FUTURE than of George Romero’s films DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) and DAY OF THE DEAD (1985). Think about it this way: One of the earliest Hollywood forerunners of Romero’s concept of the modern zombie as a symbol is William Cameron Menzies’ 1936 adaptation of the H.G. Wells story THINGS TO COME. That film – itself a forerunner of all the atomic anxiety movies of the 1950s – speculates that global warfare will infect the human population with a “wandering sickness” and drive humanity back into the dark ages. By 1970, the film theorizes, half of the human population will be eradicated. (Despite this, anti-war protesters will be punished as “traitors to civilization”... Sound familiar?) The film proposes that science will come to the rescue, rebuilding the old order by 2036… but youthful idealists will want to do more than simply re-build things as they were before. The heroes of the film eventually escape into outer space just as the heroes of DAY OF THE DEAD flee their subterranean shelter in favor of a tropical island where they can live in peace, away from the anxious power politics of “civilization.”

THE TIME MACHINE, like DAWN OF THE DEAD, shows us an apparent utopia in which humans are free from all of the possible hardships of life… then reveals that this too is a horrible fate. Humankind has been divided into two tribes: picture-perfect hippies called Eloi, and albino cave trolls called Morlocks. The Eloi live in a lush tropical wonderland (time has mysteriously transformed London into a bountiful garden in Southern California), but the ease of living has made them dull and lazy. The Morlocks live underground, where they have built machines to catch their food… namely, the Eloi. To put this in terms that a Romero fan can understand, the Morlocks have become cannibals and the Eloi have become zombies. For me, one of the most memorable scenes in the film is the one in which Yvette Mimieux lulls Rod Taylor (and us) into a trance-like infatuation with her world. "Don't your people ever speak of the past?" he asks. She answers, "There is no past." Dumbfounded, he follows up, "Well, do they ever wonder about the future?" "There is no future," she answers. In short, the Eloi have lost their humanity, and it’s up to Rod Taylor to teach them how to become human again. At the end of the film, the traveler returns to his own time (1899) and retrieves three books to use as guides for re-creating human civilization.

As I remember it, a lot of people in my Social Studies class picked the Bible as one of the three books. A few people proposed the Farmer’s Almanac. I think I might have suggested The Complete Works of William Shakespeare… which probably would have made H.G. Wells happy. But what I really want to know is: What three books would George Romero pick? (Aside from Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide, of course…)

MOVIES MADE ME #3: Darren Aronofsky

A few months ago, I read a brilliant review of Daren Aronofsky’s BLACK SWAN in Los Angeles magazine, which firmly placed the film within the context of a genre the writer calls “the Cinema of Hysteria” – a collection of off-kilter films including BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945), DUEL IN THE SUN (1946), THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1949), BEYOND THE FOREST (1949), A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951), JOHNNY GUITAR (1954), WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956), VERTIGO (1958), SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961), THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988), EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) and later works by David Lynch (especially TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and MULHOLLAND DRIVE). What do these films have in common? Steve Erickson identifies two essential components: sex and imagism.

The colloquial definition of hysteria is “a state of violent mental agitation; excessive or uncontrollable fear; a neurotic disorder characterized by violent outbreaks and disturbances of sensory and motor functions.” When the term was first coined, however, it referred to a medical condition ascribed only to women – because the condition was supposedly caused by “disturbances of the uterus.” (The word “hysteria” actually derives from the Greek word for uterus.) In the 19th century, the word “hysteria” was used to denote sexual dysfunction – a condition often treated by massaging the (female) patient to orgasm. It’s not hard to see how this term might be applied to a story about the Frankenstein Monster’s frigid bride or to Johnny Guitar’s hyper-masculine lady in waiting… to say nothing of “sexual dysfunction” associated with necrophilia (in VERTIGO) or a rape victim’s PTSD (in TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME). In these films, life becomes distorted by the perceptions of a oversexed or undersexed woman… and the men who obsess about them.

Certainly the men in these stories are just as “afflicted” as the women. I’m reminded of a short prose piece that T.S. Eliot wrote in 1915, which expresses the poet’s own “state of mental agitation” in the presence of his reputedly hysterical wife:

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden…” I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

Eliot conveys unreality through sexually-charged images and attending metaphors: the teeth like “accidental stars” (symbols of a universe in chaos), the dark caverns of her throat (a reminder of another “cavern” in his wife’s body, and its “unseen muscles”?), the pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table (pink and white finery disguising a hard-but-“rusty” object… hmmmm….). If you were to change the tone of this piece to more something aggressive and sinister (Eliot, in his “Bolo” phase, might have suggested an immediate remedy for that maddening laughter – by filling the dark caverns of her throat), you’d find yourself in the neighborhood of Roman Polanski’s film REPULSION – a film that BLACK SWAN director Daren Aronofsky claims is one of his biggest influences.

Aronofsky’s latest film thrives on sexual tension, alternating between images of puritan innocence (Natalie Portman’s bedroom is full of pink and white finery, and she shudders with horror whenever a man touches her) and experience (the club scene is a spectacular frenzy of shadows and grinding body parts), allure (exhibit A: Mila Kunis) and repulsion (exhibit B: Winona Ryder as the vengeful harpy from hell). Erickson sums up BLACK SWAN as “a berserk mix of the classic THE RED SHOES, the legendary backstage catfight ALL ABOUT EVE, and the surreal Italian horror film SUSPIRIA, with a bit of SHOWGIRLS tossed in just in case none of this is nuts enough.” In fact, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Aronofsky’s imagist collage is a little too frenzied. Either it goes too far – becoming so hysterical that it confounds the viewer’s sense of reality and yanks them out of the drama (especially, as Erickson notes, in a theater full of nervous laughter) – or it doesn’t go far enough.

A friend of mine opined that BLACK SWAN is “like a David Cronenberg movie that’s afraid to be a David Cronenberg movie.” Many of Cronenberg’s films (especially the early ones) use imagism to explore the mind-body connection. As the bodies of the characters change, so do the characters’ perceptions of reality. In BLACK SWAN, the reverse happens: As Natalie Portman’s character stretches beyond her psychological “safe zone” in order to play the “black swan” role, her body undergoes a metamorphosis. But this mind-body connection is not the main theme of the film (as it probably would be in a Cronenberg movie)… It is only a fragment servicing the main theme of all of Darren Aronofsky’s films: “No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.”

It’s fascinating to examine BLACK SWAN within the context of the Cinema of Hysteria, but I find it more helpful to consider the film within the context of Aronofsky’s body of work. Soon after I went to see BLACK SWAN, I realized that all of the director’s films are about a kind of quasi-mystical pursuit: the main characters in PI, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE FOUNTAIN and THE WRESTLER each achieve moments of transcendence as a direct result of physical sacrifice. For that reason, I think of Aronofsky’s films as “Cinema of Ecstasy” rather than “Cinema of Hysteria.” The colloquial definition of ecstasy is “a trance or trance-like state in which an individual transcends normal consciousness; a state of consciousness characterized by expanded spiritual awareness, visions or absolute euphoria.” The origin is “ex-stasis,” a Greek philosophical term that I understand (and I must admit that I’ve never studied the Greek language, only Greek philosophy) to designate a more literal “standing outside oneself.” To me, Aronofsky’s films suggest a mindset – and by that I mean a physical relationship with the world, not just an attitude toward the world – that is at once familiar and foreign to us, something ancient yet vital...

(As I write this, I realize that I’m only teasing a potentially much longer essay on Aronofsky’s work – particularly the films PI and THE FOUNTAIN, which seem to be his most complex and personal efforts. The longer essay will have to wait until I have more time.)

MOVIES MADE ME #2: POLTERGEIST

Second title, and already a theme... Seriously, nobody grew up in the 1980s without being influenced by Steven Spielberg.

Of course, there's the old debate over whether or not POLTERGEIST is more of a Spielberg movie or more of a Tobe Hooper movie... John Muir has written (in his book Horror Films of the 1980s) that it's a Spielberg movie until Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein) announces "this house is clean"; after that the story veers off the rails into Hooper's more surrealistic head-space. This is a sound argument, but as I was watching the movie a few nights ago I kept thinking that POLTERGEIST is not quite so stylistically coherent.

First things first: POLTERGEIST is NOT a ghost story. The storytellers don't seem to know much of anything about the pseudo-scientific phenomenon known as poltergeist activity. Instead, this is a movie about aliens disguised as ghosts. It has all the child-like, other-worldly speculation of Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND or Tobe Hooper's INVADERS FROM MARS, but ghosts - instead of aliens - are providing the loose justification for the wide array of strange images and events. Even if you genuinely believed in ghosts, POLTERGEIST is pretty tough to swallow. The best way to approach the film may be to try and watch it the way a child would.

I was about seven when I saw POLTERGEIST for the first time, and film affected me just as powerfully as JAWS. In some ways, even more so... because JAWS (like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) is about a family that's separated by monsters. In JAWS, Roy Scheider pursues the shark even though he could have easily stayed at home with his wife and kids. (I'm with Gil Scott-Heron on this one.) In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, Richard Dreyfus blatantly chooses aliens over his wife and son. In POLTERGEIST, however, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams do everything in their power to protect their children.

Of course, they're hopelessly outmatched... because the "poltergeist" in this movie can do anything and everything a 7-year-old's wandering mind can think of. Carol Anne's "TV People" not only stimulate hallucinations, rattle walls and move furniture... but they can also possess trees, conjure tornadoes, eject corpses from the ground, and turn an ordinary clothes closet into a magnetic Sarlac pit.

A few years ago I worked on a TV series about allegedly true ghost stories, and while I'm not going to suggest that everything in that show really happened, we did try to adhere to the popular theories about ghosts and demons that are espoused by paranormal experts. In POLTERGEIST, the only rule is that hauntings revolve around places (and can continue for years) while poltergeist activity revolves around people (and usually doesn't last very long). Based on the fact that a young girl has been ghost-napped, the experts in this film conclude that the family is dealing with poltergeist activity. Then, inexplicably, they start flip-flopping on whether or not it's a good idea for the lost girl (who has... what? dematerialized?) to "go into the light."

If memory serves, renowned ghost hunter and author Hans Holzer was the one who first claimed that poltergeist activity is the result of psychokinesis in pubescent girls (and occasionally boys). The thing is: Carol Anne, the little girl in POLTERGEIST, is pre-pubescent... and psychokinesis doesn't explain how she manages to disappear, via the family television set, into a parallel dimension... only to emerge days later from the living room ceiling like an aborted fetus from an alien spaceship. In several years of researching and talking to people about allegedly true experiences with ghosts and demons, no one even came close to telling me a whopper like this. (I wish they had, because we would have embraced it.) Reflecting on the film now, I'm reminded of Harlan Ellison's scathing review of BACK TO THE FUTURE, in which he lambasted the filmmakers for ignoring the most basic concepts of time travel. Paranormal investigators must feel the same way about POLTERGEIST.

Despite all of these problems, I can't be too hard on POLTERGEIST. This was a movie that really piqued my curiosity about death and the afterlife. I'm still captivated by the sequence in which Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) tells Robbie about "the other side." Their entire conversation takes place in the dark, in whispers. Robbie, contemplating the idea of ghosts for the first time, worries that maybe the house is haunted by a bully from his school who got hit by a car. (You'd think that a kid who had just been half-ingested by a tree would already have bigger fears than bullies from school... but I digress.) Dr. Lesh calmly reassures him with stories about a "beautiful white light," while John Williams's music swells. It's pretty simplistic stuff, but that's the beauty of the thing. This scene is a supernatural variation on the boat scene in JAWS... it pulls us into a realm where anything is possible, if only for a moment.

As a 7 or 8 year old kid, it wasn't at all difficult for me to believe in man-eating trees, killer clown dolls, or the possibility that a person's entire face could melt off. (I had nightmares for weeks about that one.) Likewise, it wasn't difficult for me to believe in that white light. The beauty and the terror associated with "the other side" were all mixed up in my imagination, and they were - for the duration of the film - much more real than the world around me. Even now, I can't watch POLTERGEIST without re-experiencing a little bit of that childhood awe. I've had the same experience when visiting locations associated with the film - the neighborhood in Agoura Hills that doubled as Cuesta Verde, and the house in Simi Valley where the Freelings beat the devil.

I also recently visited the cemetery in Westwood where Heather O'Rourke, the actress who played Carol Anne, and Dominique Dunne, the actress who played Carol Anne's older sister, are both buried. Dunne was murdered just a few short months after POLTERGEIST was released in 1982. O'Rouke died tragically a few years later, during the making of POLTERGEIST 3. She was only 12 years old, and her loss traumatized the cast and crew. (You can read more about the trials of the production here.) Real-life tragedy aside, POLTERGEIST 3 was a troubling film because it separated Carol Ann from the family that literally went to hell and back to protect her in POLTERGEIST 1 & 2. Apparently, the filmmakers didn't realize that those earlier films worked precisely because of the family dynamic. The love of the parents for their children proved powerful enough to overcome fear and even death... and that's what I took away from that first viewing of POLTERGEIST.

The Pierce Brothers Memorial Park in Westwood is home to quite a few actresses who died young - including Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood and Dorothy Stratten. I visited the cemetery on a Saturday morning, and the place was crawling with movie fans in search of their favorite stars. With so many famous people buried there, the cemetery - like POLTERGEIST - inspires more wonderment than fear or sadness. Since none of us really knows what's on "the other side," that seems completely appropriate to me.

MOVIES MADE ME #1: JAWS

One of my all-time favorite books is Geoffrey O'Brien's THE PHANTOM EMPIRE: MOVIES IN THE MIND OF THE 20TH CENTURY - a wonderfully geeky exploration of the idea that the movie-watching experience affects many of us just as deeply as real life experience. O'Brien writes:

Films get their hooks into you by propping up memory, or perhaps more accurately by substituting for memory. You can trace each image back to an original encounter; various rooms, theaters, even nations exist primarily as the place where a particular image first emerged. "Ankara is where I first saw PILLOW TALK." More than anything the pictures serve as reminders of the people who watched them. That's the post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie about giant cockroaches in Los Angeles that so deeply and inexplicably disturbed Michael. That's the doomed starlet on whom Frieda modeled her youth. That's the sentimental wartime fantasy that Dave has spent his adult life attempting to reenact. That's the comedy that Patrick watched on Channel Nine the night before he jumped. There were movies endured during all-night sieges of insomnia, movies left on while making love, movies clung to in the wake of disaster as a substitute for grieving. There were movies used as a focus point, to give the group something to laugh at or to dream about, or simply to allow them a brief respite from being so endlessly involved with one another...

I thought about this a lot while I was making my documentary on horror films -- in fact, it's the note that I ended on: Movies and reality are hopelessly conflated in the minds of many contemporary viewers. Most of us will always remember where we first saw our favorite films, who we saw them with, and exactly how we reacted to key scenes. My favorite films are burned into my brain - not necessarily because they're brilliant pieces of art (some are; some most definitely are not), but because they caught me at a particular time and place in my life, and held me there for two memorable hours. By the time the end credits rolled, those movies had become part of who I am as a living, breathing, thinking human being. This might sound a little over the top, but I'm going to try to show you what I mean.

A few months ago I changed the title of my blog to MOVIES MADE ME, with the idea of devoting this space to a series of essays on my favorite films. My plan is to work my way down a long list in the upcoming year or so. I'm kicking things off with a movie that's been a formative influence in the lives of countless moviegoers: Steven Spielberg's JAWS.

JAWS didn't keep me away from the beaches as a kid. In fact, just the opposite. I used to watch JAWS on video at the beginning of each summer -- it was my way of preparing for our annual trip to Virginia Beach, and a ritualistic way of ringing in the season. That's probably because, when I first saw the film, I wasn't half as captivated by the shark as I was by the three characters who hunt it. For me, JAWS was less of a horror movie and more of a heroic epic -- a modern-day version of MOBY DICK or 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. In high school, I even wrote a paper comparing JAWS to BEOWULF.

The key difference between JAWS and those other epic adventures is that Quint - the modern-day equivalent of Ahab, Captain Nemo and Beowulf - is not the main hero. The hero in JAWS is Police Chief Martin Brody, an everyman and a very sympathetic father-figure. I remember thinking, even as a six year old, that he wasn't that different from my own dad. How could anyone fail to love him after the scene where he's sitting at the dinner table with his son, making faces for the boy to mimic? God bless Roy Scheider.

Here's how I remember it: My father had just gotten a membership at the new video store in my hometown. After recognizing how I gravitated to the horror section of the store, he rented MICHAEL JACKSON'S THRILLER and JAWS. I think he chose the former because it featured a long making-of documentary. Those behind-the-scenes features showed his ridiculously impressionable six-year-old son that movie monsters are simply the result of makeup and special effects. I'm not sure why he chose to rent JAWS... maybe to test my nerve. All I know is that, when it came time to watch the second feature, the rest of my family disappeared to a back bedroom and left me alone in the living room to tackle JAWS.

About a year ago, an interviewer for Fangoria TV asked me to identify my favorite horror movie scare scenes. The interviewer suggested "the scene in JAWS where the shark pops out of the water for the first time." I responded that those kind of "jump scenes" aren't usually what scare me in horror movies. I explained that the scene in JAWS that affected me most profoundly is the one where Quint, Brody and Hooper are on Quint's boat at night, sharing war stories. I still think this is one of the most brilliant sequences in modern film history.

There are basically four parts to this sequence. The first part begins with the otherworldly sounds of a whale song -- a subtle cue that we've crossed over into a kind of mythic realm. Quint and Hooper begin comparing "battle wounds," prompting us to think about the possible repercussions of a shark attack while keeping things disarmingly light with their competitive humor. The conversation culminates with Hooper's drunken reference to the girl who broke his heart. Then the tone shifts suddenly as Quint recounts his experience on the U.S.S. Indianapolis. For me, Quint's monologue was more unsettling than the scene where a kid gets attacked by a shark and erupts in a geyser of blood - because it haunts the imagination rather than simply shocking the eyes.

I remember listening to Quint's story for the first time, and imagining myself in his situation. At the time, I was sitting in an old recliner in the middle of the living room floor. To a six year old, that living room was HUGE... I might just as well have been in the middle of the ocean. And it was dark. In the hour since I had begun watching the movie, night had fallen outside and suddenly the only light in the room was coming from the television. The only light in my world was the light on that boat... and Quint was slowly stealing it away with his haunting memories of being alone in the water at night, while hungry sharks were circling around him.

Spielberg lets the tension in the scene build for an excruciatingly long time. Then, because he's a master craftsman, he lets us down gently... A few moments later, the jovial atmosphere returns and all three heroes start singing drunkenly. That's when the shark finally attacks - literally pummeling the boat and prompting us to expect the worst. A slight leak suggests that the boat is far from unsinkable, and at that point our brains can't help gnawing on the fresh details of Quint's story... particularly the part about waiting to die. The heroes listen and wait. We, the audience, listen and wait. The night is silent. After a few moments, it becomes clear that we've survived... for now. But the drinking games are over, and you can bet that no one on that boat or in the audience will be sleeping too peacefully in the hours that follow.

It was only after that scene ended that I realized how immersed in the film I really was. I had lost all sense of self-awareness. I had surrendered my own reality in favor of the story's reality. Right away, I realized how effectively the storyteller was manipulating my emotions. For me, that moment of realization was profound. If I had to identify a single moment when I became a movie geek, that would be it.

How did I respond? I eagerly dove back into the movie and didn't come up for air until it was over. At that point, with my adrenaline finally starting to wane, I felt utterly euphoric. After JAWS, I was like a 6-year-old heroin addict, eager for more... and to this day, every time I sit down to watch a movie, I'm still waiting for my next fix.

(Note: The JAWS illustration above is by Justin Reed. You can check out his amazing portfolio on his website, Justin Reed Art.)