MOVIES MADE ME #12: THE HITCHER

Last weekend, my wife and I needed to get away from it all, so we headed to a place where we could hear wind and coyotes at night, instead of traffic and car alarms. On Saturday, we aimed for the middle of nowhere and ended up in the ghost town of Amboy, California.

Amboy is known mostly for the Amboy Crater, an extinct volcano that used to be a major tourist attraction along Route 66. Ever since highway 40 was built, however, the crater marks the intersection of two old roads that don’t really go anywhere. Until 2006, there wasn’t any incentive to take a detour... and, if you did, you’d probably just get chased away by the town caretaker.

The town consists of a post office (operational), an airport (not operational), a church and a small schoolhouse (both abandoned), a quaint 50’s-style motel (closed), and a gas station / café called Roy's. Thanks to a road sign that you can see from miles away, Roy’s gets all the traffic - despite the fact that the kitchen is permanently closed. That's okay, because most of the visitors are probably just tourists who are happy to catch an authentic glimpse of American history. There are also a few weirdos like me who recognize the setting from movies.

The first time I “visited” Roy’s Café was with Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell in the 1986 movie THE HITCHER. (This is where Howell pulls a gun on his pursuer, and where Hauer taunts his reluctant traveling companion by placing pennies on his eyelids.) The first time I saw the film, I was thoroughly rattled – and not just by Hauer’s staggeringly brilliant performance as the gay panic boogeyman. I grew up on the east coast, so I found the stark western landscape exotic and forbidding, beautiful and terrifying. I’m not going to say that the landscape is what makes the movie work (that would be an insult to three outstanding actors), but there’s no question that the setting is itself a character in the story. Screenwriter Eric Red says the basic idea for the movie came to him while he was driving through the desert listening to The Doors song “Riders on the Storm.” That’s all he needed… miles and miles of empty sun-baked road, and the lyric “there’s a killer on the road.”

Thankfully, the producers hired a director (former stills photographer Robert Harmon) who could capture the landscape at its best. There’s a scene in this film where Howell’s character is fighting for his life, and still can’t help stopping to stare in awe at the late afternoon sun partially eclipsed by desert clouds. The beauty of that single shot - no more than five seconds of screen time - is staggering. That moment sums up the film for me: The day is as dark as the night is long. Anyone who’s ever fallen in love with the desert understands that. THE HITCHER is both primal and poetic, and that's a rarity.

According to Harry Medved’s book “Hollywood Escapes,” THE HITCHER was shot mostly in sequence. Scene by scene, the film crew moved south through the Mojave Desert. In the film, C. Thomas Howell’s character is driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, but for some reason he takes a circuitous route from Death Valley to the Imperial Sand Dunes. Along the way, he makes stops in Amargosa (where Hauer confronts him in an abandoned garage), Daggett (where Howell meets Jennifer Jason Leigh in a greasy spoon diner), Amboy and Glamis (the truck stop, where Leigh meets her maker). By the time he reaches the Imperial Sand Dunes, there's a new killer on the road.

On the road out of Death Valley (east)

The garage in Amargosa

Daggett, with the ghost town of Calico in the distance

Amboy Crater

View of the "lava pit" in Amboy Crater, with the town of Amboy in the background

Roy's Cafe in Amboy

Truck stop in Glamis

Imperial Sand Dunes

On the road out of Death Valley (west)

For anyone else crazy enough to recreate this drive, I recommend Harold Budd's album "The White Arcades" as musical accompaniment. We happened to be listening to the track "Coyote" while we drove through the salt fields south of Amboy, and it was a perfect combination of landscape and soundscape. Since no one has uploaded "Coyote" to youtube, I'm going to conclude with a very different piece of music - from another film about an ill-fated road trip. Can you guess which one?

MOVIES MADE ME #11: THE ABYSS

This past weekend, I saw my first drive-in movie. Seems strange that it’s taken me 32 years to get around to it. Until now, I’ve had to experience the drive-in vicariously through Joe Bob Briggs. I’d like to report that my first drive-in experience was a double-feature of grindhouse classics... but I’d be lying. Instead I saw THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, a ho-hum adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story. I didn’t realize it was a Philip K. Dick story until the end credits, because the philosophical sci-fi elements were almost entirely overwhelmed by a mildly engaging love story between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.

The most interesting thing about the film was its basic premise: We (humans) can’t be trusted to not destroy ourselves. This theme has been done many times before – and with better results. The first example that springs to mind is James Cameron’s THE ABYSS.

At first glance, THE ABYSS is simply a variation on Cameron’s earlier film ALIENS. It’s about a group of blue-collar workers in a no-man’s land who encounter an alien life form… Except this time, the workers are underwater oil riggers instead of “space truckers,” and the alien is not the real threat. In fact, the aliens in THE ABYSS come to Earth to save us from ourselves. When the U.S. military is confronted with something it can't explain, Uncle Sam starts gearing up for a nuclear war. The only thing that can save humanity is… a broken marriage. This movie’s “heart of the ocean” is the relationship between head oil rigger Ed Harris and his estranged wife Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, two tough-as-nails characters who I have to assume bear some similarities to the Hollywood power couple that produced the film. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that these two characters are the saving grace of humanity, but they are certainly the saving grace of this film.

Although it’s a little slow getting started and rather heavy-handed at the end, I will always love THE ABYSS for the beauty of one particular sequence. In a last-ditch effort to save humanity from nuclear disaster, Ed Harris puts on a dive suit, consents to breathing oxygenated water (easier said than done, I imagine), and descends more than a mile into the darkness of the ocean so that he can defuse a bomb. The trip threatens to literally crush his head and drive him mad. Along the way, he becomes lost and completely disoriented in the freezing blackness. He has only one lifeline: His wife speaks to him remotely, telling him to focus on her voice as she reassures him that he’s not alone. Eventually, she brings him back from the brink of despair.

This sequence has always made a strong impression on me, because it’s a brilliantly evocative metaphor for death – the one trip that we must all make alone. Appropriately, even after Harris’s character defuses the bomb, he still has to face the inevitable. He realizes that he doesn’t have enough air to survive the ascent, tells his wife he always knew it was a “one way ticket,” and surrenders to fate. Part of me would really like the end the movie there, before the psychedelic jellyfish intervene and threaten humanity with 100-foot-high tsunamis.

Then again, I have to admit that the tsunami images made a big impression on me the first time I saw the special edition of this film. For years, I’d been having dreams about tsunamis, although I had no idea what a tsunami was. In his day and age, of course, it’s virtually impossible not to know what a tsunami is… but when I was a kid, I’d never heard the term and I did not consciously realize that ocean waves could be big enough to swallow a city. It was my dreams that introduced me to the concept and, when I saw it in THE ABYSS, I felt like James Cameron had reached into my nightmares. (Ditto for Peter Weir’s THE LAST WAVE.)

The 100-foot-high tsunami in THE ABYSS remains one of the most haunting images I can imagine (though it's been recreated with better visual effects in a dozen disaster movies), because there is nothing to do in the face of a sight like that except stare in awe. You could run, but you can't hide. I remember a passage in one of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, where a man was about to be crushed by a giant monster. (In this case, the monster was a 100-foot-high mutant conglomeration of human bodies instead of a 100-foot-high wave.) Instead of running, he simply stared at the monster moving toward him and thought: I might as well die now, because even if I live another hundred years, I’ll never experience anything to top this. That’s the thing about “the abyss” – it is terrifying, but it is also awe-inspiring. In a moment like that, a person has to surrender to something larger than oneself. Surrender to despair, surrender to love, surrender to the unknown...

In my mind, that's what makes Cameron's film(s) so resonant. He knows that we live our lives searching for something large enough to fill the abyss. And sometimes we don’t even know we've found that something until the moment when we are facing the void. In that moment on the brink of annihilation, we’d all like to be able to confront death the way that Ed Harris’s character does… understanding and accepting that we’ve always had a “one way ticket,” being grateful for the things we've found along the way, and standing ready to confront the great unknown.

MOVIES MADE ME #10: SAY ANYTHING

There’s a scene in SAY ANYTHING where Lloyd Dobler is at a graduation party with Diane Court, and this goofy-looking guy with a bad 80s haircut comes up to him and says, “How did you get Diane Court to go out with you?” Lloyd responds, matter-of-fact, “I called her up.” The other guy, still confused, adds, “But how come it worked? I mean, like, who are you?” Lloyd answers, “I’m Lloyd Dobler.” You could say that he’s playing it cool, but really Lloyd is just stating the facts. He did convince Diane Court to go out with him simply by calling her up. At this point in the movie, even Diane Court isn’t quite sure why she said yes. The goofy-looking guy, obviously stoned, takes a few seconds to fully process the information, then smiles. “This is great,” he says, “This gives me hope.”

On the DVD commentary, Crowe says that SAY ANYTHING originated with the character of Diane Court. The writer/director calls Diane a “golden girl." One of the characters in the film clarifies: "She's a brain trapped in the body of a game show hostess.” Smart and beautiful, ambitious yet humble. The problem with the script, Crowe says, was inventing a guy who actually deserved Diane Court. He was stumped, until the solution showed up on his doorstep one day – in the guise of a gentleman kickboxer named Lowell. Crowe describes his real-life inspiration for Lloyd Dobler as stoic, noble, polite and (most importantly) optimistic. That’s how he wrote the character.

But that's only half of Lloyd Dobler. Crowe admits that he wrote a sunny character, someone who is instinctively optimistic. Actor John Cusack gave the character more complexity. Cusack says he wanted Lloyd to be a true teenager of the Reagan era – someone jaded and angry about yuppie culture, and therefore very anxious about the future. It was Cusack who came up with Lloyd’s GRADUATE-esque manifesto: “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” As Lloyd explains to his guidance counselor, he’s “looking for a dare-to-be-great situation.” Deep down, he's too restless to settle for anything less.

That’s why he falls for Diane. She is clearly marked for greatness. Which brings us to the main question: Why does Diane Court fall for Lloyd Dobler? That’s what the goofy-looking guy at the party – and probably a good portion of the male audience – is trying to figure out. In high school, what I personally keyed in on was the phone call. “I just called her up,” Lloyd said. Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple. He had to psyche himself up for the phone call by kicking a punching bag for a while. Once the adrenaline was flowing, he picked up the phone and dialed Diane's number. (Not just six numbers... All seven of them.)

I figured I could handle that. I went for a three mile run, then called up a girl I’d only talked to once or twice. A girl who was way too beautiful and way too smart to ever date me. She was also a year older -- and when you're a freshman in high school, that's a pretty big deal. I had no plan about what to say to her. I was 15 and had no car, so I couldn’t very well ask her out on a date.... I figured I'd just keep talking until she joined in or hung up.

Unlike Lloyd, I didn’t get the girl. But she did become one of my closest friends for the next several years. That said, I figured the random phone call had been effective enough to warrant a second attempt. The next attempt didn’t go as well. The girl and I had absolutely nothing in common. To make matters worse, she had an on-again, off-again boyfriend who liked to slash people’s tires. I figured: Third time’s the charm. By that point, I had a license so I could actually propose a date. I didn’t get a date, but I got another close friend.

It’s no great mystery why I couldn’t pull off the “Lloyd Dobler effect.” First of all, I don’t look like John Cusack. Second, I never had the guts or the charm to deliver the “friends with potential” line. Most importantly, I was insecure. That’s the one thing that Lloyd Dobler is not, and it’s the secret of SAY ANYTHING. On the DVD commentary, Cameron Crowe and John Cusack sum up the essence of the character by saying that, for him, “optimism is a revolutionary act.”

Lloyd Dobler is often frustrated and angry, and he obviously has some violent tendencies (the guy wants to be a professional kickboxer, for crying out loud), but he always restrains his urge to lash out... Even in the scene where he gives Diane his heart and she gives him a pen... Even when she comes back to him and pleads for his forgiveness. (What guy, post-breakup, hasn’t dreamed of turning this opportunity into a cruel revenge scenario?) In the worst of circumstances, Lloyd makes a conscious choice to follow his better instincts and to present his best side to the world. It took me a while to learn that lesson.

The most famous scene in SAY ANYTHING is the one where Lloyd fights for Diane by showing up outside her bedroom window, and playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” on his boom box. The music and the look on John Cusack's face in that scene say everything you need to know about Lloyd and the movie. Extra footage from the special edition DVD shows that this look almost didn't exist. In every other take on this scene, the look on Cusack’s face is defiantly hostile. It's clear that Lloyd wants to prove his point (that Diane still needs him) more than he actually wants her back. The scene is too much about his fragile male ego, and not enough about his love for Diane. On the other hand, the take in the final film achieves a perfect balance: Lloyd looks proud and stoic, but not petulant. Apparently, he has taken to heart his friend Cory’s advice: “Be a man. Don’t be a guy…”

The music in the scene (Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," which became a staple on radio request shows after the movie was released) was also a near-miss. Cameron Crowe originally wanted to use Billy Idol’s “To Be a Lover." When the scene was shot the first time, he opted instead for Fishbone’s “Turn the Other Way.” Neither song would have conveyed emotional vulnerability. Again, the scene would have been about Lloyd’s wounded pride instead of his unwavering love for Diane.

Bottom line: It took at least two men to invent Lloyd Dobler… one who was maybe a little too sunny to win Diane's heart and one who was maybe a little too dark to keep it. Combine the two and you've got a story that shows we can only attain the unattainable once we’ve learned how to balance ego and selfless love, self-control and surrender. Lloyd is a character who can handle genuine intimacy. That's why he gets the girl. And that’s probably the most significant realization I ever took away from any teen angst movie... Maybe even one of the most helpful realizations I’ve ever taken away from any movie.

On a random side-note, Cameron Crowe says on the DVD commentary that the boom box scene was shot in a park opposite the 7-11 where Lloyd kicks broken glass out of Diane’s way. About a year ago, someone told me that the 7-11 in SAY ANYTHING is the one at the corner of Magnolia and Tujunga in Valley Village. As it happens, there's a huge park across the street, on the other side of Tujunga. It's hard to tell if this is the same place, but like the idea that Lloyd and Diane’s courtship might have taken place in my backyard.

MOVIES MADE ME #9: THE DOORS

For a generation that came of age in the late 1960s / early 1970s, there was no ignoring the influence of Jim Morrison. For a kid growing up in rural Virginia in the late 1980s / early 1990s, it was a little easier… at least until Oliver Stone made THE DOORS. There are a two main reasons that the film made such an impression on me:

1) Val Kilmer becomes Jim Morrison. Today I can’t watch footage of the real Jim Morrison without thinking of Val Kilmer’s performance, and I can’t watch Val Kilmer in any other film without thinking of Jim Morrison. That’s true of only one other performance that I can think of: Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. (Every time I watch a Johnny Depp movie, I notice at least one small moment when he lapses into his Hunter Thompson persona… and it often thrills me more than anything else in the movie.)

2) Every single scene in THE DOORS is driven by music and/or poetry. It would have been easy enough to make a film that simply hit the high notes, but this film delves deep into the band’s catalogue. I was familiar with the staples ("Break on Through," "Light My Fire," etc.) which played routinely on Charlottesville’s classic rock station (3WV, anyone?), but this was my introduction to “Love Street,” “Indian Summer,” “Dead Cats, Dead Rats,” poems from An American Prayer and the epic “Celebration of the Lizard.” I already appreciated the music of The Doors, but the impressionistic poetry really hooked me. I became captivated, like so many before me, by Jim Morrison’s attempts to “reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages.”

The big debate is whether or not Oliver Stone should have made a film about the man behind the myth instead of perpetuating the exaggerated popular perception. The film begins with the Morrison's claim that he was possessed by a dead Indian as a young child. Stone builds the movie around this moment of willful self-invention, repeatedly featuring the rock god's ghostly Indian companion in important scenes – most notably, a sequence where The Doors drop acid in the Mojave Desert and Jim descends like Orpheus into an Indian cave to be quickened. Stone does all this to forward the film’s overarching idea of Jim Morrison as “shaman” – a leader who suffers and dies to “purify the tribe.”

Jim’s band mate Ray Manzarek has been pretty outspoken about his dislike for what follows. He’s essentially said that Stone misrepresents his friend as a drunken buffoon rather than a radical intellectual; as someone who uses drugs to escape pain rather than to "break on through." Manzarek is even more blunt in his autobiography, where he writes about Stone’s attempt to recreate one of Jim Morrison’s student films:

“…Oliver tried to re-create Jim’s film based on what I told him and what I’m now telling you. Of course, he went completely over the top. A grotesque exaggeration. And how he turned Jim into a disciple of Adolf Hitler, well… perhaps someone ought to look into Mr. Stone’s psyche; into what I perceive to be his latent anti-Semitism, and not-so-latent fascist tendencies. I like to think that little student movie is as revealing of Oliver’s real problems as anything he’s ever done. It’s all there in capsule form. A wonderful reduction of psychotic leanings.

And what a misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche. Typical Leopold and Loeb-type of misinterpretation. If you don’t understand the concept of the Ubermensch, Oliver, don’t quote Nietzsche. Don’t do what the Nazis did. Don’t interpret the warriors freedom from the lowered state of consciousness of the first three chakras. That only begets a Hell’s Angels type of man. It uses the will to power as a justification to be the bringer of death instead of a bringer of joy and creativity. The lowered consciousness shouldn’t approach Nietzsche. He’s too dangerous. Nietzsche would have you leave all your preconceptions, all your childish beliefs, all your fears, and step into the light of freedom and divine responsibility. He would have you become a creator, if you dared. A creator who was responsible for the continuation of this existence. A lover of life. A dancer. A proud, bold, laughing man who delights in all the nuances and dangers of this all-too-brief life of ours. Not a naysayer or an extinguisher of life, but one who embraces it all and says, “Again!” And if you don’t understand that, don’t get too close to the fire. It’s highly volatile. This heat is definitely more than you should approach, Mr. Oliver Stone.”

Manzarek’s rant is as over the top as Stone’s fake student film (it’s hard to take someone seriously when they’re criticizing someone else’s chakras), but he has a point: Nietzsche’s philosophy is life-affirming, not nihilistic. And I like to think that Jim Morrison’s “road of excess” was equally life-affirming. That's what drew me into the myth.

In my mind, Stone’s film breaks down into three acts. The first act is about Jim Morrison, a precocious young man who wanted to break through his own insecurities and do something meaningful. (There is no hint, in the film, of the chunky intellectual military brat presented in Danny Sugarman’s book No One Here Gets Out Alive.) In Act 2, the rock god explodes. Overwhelmed by his own public mystique, Jim loses himself in the fashioning of a modern-day myth. Though he initiates his “prolonged derangement of the senses, to attain the unknown,” he’s ultimately at the mercy of forces greater than himself, a mortal participant – not a god – in the great Dionysian revelry. Accordingly, the third act is tragedy: the “fake hero” implodes. Like Zarathustra, he has his limitations.

How else could it end? This is the way the Sixties ended. When I first saw the film as a teenager in the early 1990s, however, THE DOORS didn’t seem to me like a cautionary tale. It seemed like a celebration of life in extremis and I got caught up in the dance, anticipating a different ending: “I am of today and before… but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and time to come.“ The would-be hero dies, but the music and the poetry obviously live on. All these years later, people are still making pilgrimages to Morrison's mysterious grave in Paris, searching for something larger than everyday life.

I haven't made that trip, but I did make a trip last fall to Mitchell Caverns in the Mojave Desert, the shooting location where Jim Morrison’s first acid trip culminates. While I was there, one of the guides said that Oliver Stone and company defaced this natural preserve by painting their own petroglyphs on the walls. (Note the white paint on the walls in the second to last photo.)