John Carpenter Revisited: THEY LIVE (1988)

The legacy of John Carpenter’s 1988 film THEY LIVE seems to loom larger with every passing year.  Maybe that’s why I’ve put off writing about it for so long.  So much has been written about the film’s heightened relevance in the Trump era that, at this point, drawing specific connections seems as unnecessary as pointing out the film’s “hidden message.”  You don’t need any special glasses to see this shit. 

That said, it doesn’t feel right to simply write about THEY LIVE as a genre film.  It’s something more… and something less.  A few months ago, I took part in an online poll of professional horror geeks to name the best horror films of the 1980s.  I was stunned when THEY LIVE beat out A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET for third place.  (Carpenter’s THE THING took home the top prize, followed by David Cronenberg’s THE FLY.)  I love THEY LIVE, but I wouldn’t even call it a horror movie, let alone a contender the best horror movie of the 80s.  Nevermind that I prominently featured THEY LIVE in my 2009 documentary about the best American horror movies… I still think THEY LIVE is science fiction.  That’s how Carpenter himself described it to Starlog journalist Steve Swires in 1987—as a “science-fiction thriller.”  Elsewhere, he has compared it directly to Don Siegel's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956).  To be fair, the filmmaker has also described it as an “existential western” (to Cinefantastique’s Dennis Fischer in 1989).  More recently, he has declared that the film is his version of THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939).  I understand the comparison, but there’s a hell of a tonal difference between THE GRAPES OF WRATH and THEY LIVE.    

Until recently, I have always thought of THEY LIVE as a bit of a farce.  This is, after all, the movie in which “Rowdy” Roddy Piper declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.  And I’m all out of bubblegum”—right before blowing away a bunch of aliens.  It’s a movie with a WWF-style street brawl that stops the story cold for a whopping six minutes.  It’s a movie that ends abruptly with an alien sex scene.  All I’m saying is that THEY LIVE doesn’t ask to be taken too seriously.  And yet it deserves to be taken seriously.

Watching the film at The Egyptian theater in Hollywood a few nights ago, I was riveted by the first twenty minutes of the film—which are stark and gritty and seething with righteous anger.  The long, slow rollout of the story is filled with haunting images of downtown Los Angeles at a time when Reaganomics was taking a visible toll on the city and its residents.  (For anyone curious about the specific filming locations, Jared Cowan of Los Angeles Magazine recently compiled a then-and-now photo essay.)  Skid Row appears here as a dystopian nightmare, America's purgatory full of hungry ghosts.  Roddy Piper’s character John Nada manages to hold his head high among the wreckage, but his expressions of abiding faith in America sound naïve when police invade and raze the community to the ground. 

The police raid is reminiscent of attacks on the Okies in THE GRAPES OF WRATH, and also illustrates President Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the New Deal that had lifted working-class Americans out of the Great Depression.  What I didn't realize until recently is that the sequence is essentially a reenactment.  In THEY LIVE, the homeless camp is called Justiceville, and its most vocal leader is a street preacher.  In fact, there was a real Justiceville in downtown Los Angeles, organized by a street preacher named Ted Hayes.  It was destroyed by police in 1985, and the story was told in a 1986 Discovery Channel documentary.   

Justiceville from garyglaser on Vimeo.

  

John Carpenter obviously had strong personal feelings about this injustice.  And that’s what keeps THEY LIVE from becoming a farce.  When John Nada puts on his shades and goes to war with yuppie aliens, he’s fighting a real war.  His enemies may look like rejects from a 1950s monster movie, but the people he’s sticking up for are real.  Carpenter cast real Skid Row residents as the citizens of Justiceville, and he seems to have made a genuine connection with them.  In 1988 the director told Steve Swires, “I’ve realized that true success has nothing to do with how much money you make.  It has to do with the principles by which you live.  So, in that respect, I actually feel much safer among the street people in downtown Los Angeles than among the millionaires in Beverly Hills.”

In the end, the street-dwellers in THEY LIVE inaugurate a revolution in human consciousness; they “wake up” John Nada to a hidden reality.   Carpenter says he always knew THEY LIVE would be a “hidden-reality” movie, but he only worked out the details after stumbling upon a comic book adaptation of Ray Nelson’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning.”  The filmmaker told Nerdist’s Luke Thompson that in the source story, “humanity was hypnotized, almost as if you go up on stage and see a stage hypnotist, and I thought, ehh, that’s kinda corny, so I changed it to a radio frequency to disguise real reality.” 

In an essay in the newly-released tome They Live: A Visual and Cultural Awakening, Roger Luckhurst suggests that Carpenter might have also drawn some additional inspiration from Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, another "hidden reality" story.   (Certainly, Carpenter was familiar with Dick's work, as he had previously contemplated directing a film adaptation of the author's short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale").  

I read Time Out of Joint for the first time last year, and it resonated for me in a startling way.  The novel is about a middle-aged man named Ragle Gumm who one day reaches for a cord to turn on a light in his house… only to find that the cord isn’t there.  It never has been there.  So why does he remember it?  This surreal experience causes Gumm to suspect that his reality has been altered. 

The story gets weirder from there—and so did Dick’s novels.  A few years after Time Out of Joint, he wrote The Man in the High Castle, about characters living in a reality where Germany and Japan won World War II.  The story is set into motion when the characters discover evidence of an alternate reality—in which the Allies won the war.  Which reality is the “real” one?  Even the author wasn’t sure.  Sometime after writing The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick theorized that he himself was living in an alternate reality.  He claimed to have vivid memories of a timeline in which Nixon survived Watergate and turned America into a totalitarian state.  “I’m not saying merely, ‘It can happen here,’” the author wrote, “but rather, ‘It did happen here.  I remember…’”

You can probably see where I’m going with this.  Philip K. Dick’s work resonated for me because, to a certain degree, I feel like we all slipped into an alternate reality when Donald Trump became the 45^th President of the United States.  Even today, it seems like an unbelievable turn of events.  If President Trump had appeared in a work of fiction before 2016, you would have said the work was too farfetched.   Emotionally, our reality in 2019 feels like Phildickian science fiction.  Which brings me back to THEY LIVE.

In 2016, an interviewer asked John Carpenter if Americans should watch THEY LIVE before voting in the presidential election.  Carpenter responded, “Nah.  It’s just a movie.”   Carpenter’s dismissive response reinforces his desire to “hide” his “message” for commercial reasons.   In 1989 he acknowledged that “people who go to the movies in vast numbers these days don’t want to be enlightened,” only entertained.  Should I point out the irony of the director diluting his “message movie” for commercial reasons?  Nah.  It’s just a movie. 

In spite of his reluctance to talk about THEY LIVE's "message," Carpenter has been very vocal about his contempt for Ronald Reagan and the neoconservative movement in 1980s America, at one point calling the decade “a real bad time in America, a real Nazi time.”  What must the director be thinking now?   Maybe it’s time to dust off his idea for HYPNOWAR, the long-rumored sequel to THEY LIVE?  

The trick, of course, would be once again making a film that is both culturally relevant and also fun.  In 1988, Carpenter explained how he managed to pull this off the first time around.  “I wasn’t quite sure how to tell the story,” he admitted. “One way was to make it scary, but this element of humor always kept creeping into it.  I was at a loss as to how to bring it all together… until I met Roddy Piper at WRESTLEMANIA III.”   

I think it's fair to say that the reason THEY LIVE continues to win over audiences is not because of its increasingly relevant “message,” but because of its playful and often ridiculous sense of humor.  This is a fun, celebratory film—because, in spite of everything, John Carpenter loves America.  John Nada loves America.  This was the basis of a strong, deeply personal collaboration between the director and the star—and that's what gives this very dark film its very big heart. 

Perhaps the only worthy sequel to THEY LIVE is a conversation the two men had on the Piper’s Pit podcast in 2015.  Carpenter and Piper didn’t talk much about the film and they certainly didn’t talk about politics; they talked about life—hard times and crushing insecurities, and the way that friendship and love helped them through these things.  That’s a reality that everyone needs to wake up to.

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John Carpenter Revisited: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987)

“This isn’t a teenage movie.  Many films today are about young people being hip.  But these characters are adults.” – John Carpenter in Fangoria #69 (1987)

I was a teenager when I first saw Carpenter’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS and I had mixed feelings about it.  On one hand, the film captured the same atmosphere of dread that I loved in HALLOWEEN, THE FOG and THE THING.  On the other hand, it seemed incongruously “talky.”  Much of the dialogue was over my head (I knew nothing about quantum physics), and sometimes seemed downright silly.  As a result, I privately regarded PRINCE OF DARKNESS as an “almost movie” for years.

This was before I discovered the work of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, and learned to appreciate a more abstract kind of horror cinema.  When I finally re-watched PRINCE OF DARKNESS in my early 20s, I was much more impressed.  I allowed the atmosphere of dread to infect me emotionally, instead of letting my overactive brain dilute that effect.  I still didn’t know much about quantum physics, but the evocative imagery and the haunting score really stayed with me—so much that I inadvertently cribbed Carpenter’s ending in an early script I wrote. 

Since then, every time I watch PRINCE OF DARKNESS, I like it more and more.  Seeing it soon after I moved to Los Angeles in 2006 (and visiting the church where it was filmed) added an aura of immediacy to the story.  When I watched it last week, I realized that PRINCE OF DARKNESS has actually become my favorite John Carpenter movie—because it resonates for me on many different levels, emotional and intellectual.   

The most striking thing about the film, for me, is still its oppressive tone.  It has an undeniable nightmare quality, a sense of the uncanny, or what Freud called “fear without object.”  From the very beginning, the pacing and the music are brooding and ominous; the imagery (a dead priest, a partial solar eclipse) portentous and elemental.  The film’s atmosphere as a whole is neo-gothic, a vaguely Roman nightmare transplanted into modern Los Angeles.

Carpenter took some of his inspiration from Dario Argento, especially the film INFERNO.  Some critics have pointed out similarities between the courtyard stabbings in both films, but for me the slasher-movie stuff isn’t the strength of either film.  My favorite part of INFERNO is the underwater room sequence; I love how careful and restrained it is.  Argento is usually remembered for the way he visually and aurally assaults audiences with hyper-violent murder set pieces, but I think his greatest strength is his ability to build an aura of nightmarish unreality.  The underwater sequence in INFERNO reveals the director at his dreamiest: luring us into a beautiful, surrealistic trap that we can’t escape from. 

This is exactly the sort of thing that Carpenter does throughout PRINCE OF DARKNESS.  He sets the pace with an opening credits sequence that uses long, languid takes to pull us into his slowly dying world.  In 1987, when MTV-style cutting was the order of the day in horror movies, that took some confidence.  The rest of the film builds just as slowly.

Carpenter was going clearly for the feel of “classic horror”—classic cinematic horror as well as classic literary horror.   Most people know that Carpenter is an H.P. Lovecraft fan, and we can see that author’s influence in the otherworldly creatures in THE THING and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS.  But what the director really learned from Lovecraft was how to create an atmosphere of mounting dread.  In several interviews, Carpenter has alluded to Lovecraft’s short story “The Outsider,” about a character who lives in fear of a lurking monster.  When the character finally comes face to face with the monster, he realizes that he’s looking at his own reflection in a mirror.  He is the monster.  Carpenter told biographer Gilles Boulenger, “If I applied anything from [Lovecraft] for PRINCE OF DARKNESS, it was […] the way he built his stories very slowly to reach that gasp.” 

Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau's ORPHEUS (1950)

PRINCE OF DARKNESS also builds to a revealing scene involving a mirror, but the final imagery in Carpenter’s film seems to owe as much to Jean Cocteau’s film ORPHEUS as to Lovecraft.   I don’t know for sure that ORPHEUS was an influence, because I’ve never heard Carpenter say anything about Cocteau—and I have a feeling that he might have mixed feelings about Cocteau’s work in general, because it can be rather pretentious.  Jean Cocteau was not a genre filmmaker; John Carpenter is perhaps the purest genre filmmaker of his generation, so it’s natural that Carpenter should talk about Lovecraft rather than Cocteau. 

Lovecraft’s fiction is about a mythological barrier between our world and a parallel world inhabited by a race of ancient monsters.  Cocteau’s ORPHEUS is about a symbolic barrier between life and death.  When the philosopher-poet at the center of Cocteau’s story (played by Jean Marais) travels to “the other side” via a liquid mirror, a beautiful agent of death (played by Maria Casares) chastises him for crossing a barrier that man was not meant to cross.  Cocteau’s story is modeled on a classical Greek tale about a man who woos the gods, and wins; Lovecraft’s stories are classic apocalyptic Gothic tales, about the meaninglessness of man’s existence in relation to the gods.

The scientists in PRINCE OF DARKNESS find themselves on that same threshold between worlds—but their story is closer to Lovecraft’s, because the “gods” in Carpenter’s story have come to them, not the other way around.  Carpenter once said that his original concept for the film was simple: “The Devil is buried under a Los Angeles church, and graduate students come to fight him.”  To say that PRINCE OF DARKNESS is about fighting the Christian Devil, however, is as reductive as saying that Maria Casares represents Death in Cocteau’s ORPHEUS; she is an agent in a more mysterious mythology of life and death and transformation.  Carpenter’s original idea likewise evolved, and PRINCE OF DARKNESS ultimately became (like Carpenter’s earlier films HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, and THE THING) a film about a fabulous, formless Evil.  

Maria Casares in ORPHEUS (1950)

To be fair, Carpenter probably never thought too seriously about the Christian Devil when he was making PRINCE OF DARKNESS—because he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in the Christian Devil.  Carpenter’s formative influences were not Greek mythology and Christian theology, but British and American genre movies of the 1950s and 60s.  Foremost among these movies was the work of playwright and screenwriter Nigel Kneale, the man responsible for the QUATERMASS series (produced by the BBC, and later remade by Hammer Films) and THE STONE TAPE (BBC).  Kneale, like the American writer Richard Matheson, often told stories about cosmic horror subjected to the scrutiny of modern science.  His greatest achievement is arguably QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, about a group of scientists who examine evidence of an ancient-but-advanced alien civilization buried beneath the streets of London. That story has much in common with PRINCE OF DARKNESS.

Carpenter acknowledged his debt to Kneale in the opening credits of PRINCE OF DARKNESS, by attributing his own original screenplay to “Martin Quatermass.”   I don’t think he did this because he felt like he was ripping off Kneale’s story, but because he was aspiring to Kneale’s kind of horror.  The older writer once said, “If you can’t involve people’s imagination beyond the stage of look-behind-you, you miss a great deal.  I mean, the raising of a whole structure of ideas that should tingle in the audience’s mind long afterwards.”  Carpenter had already mastered the look-behind-you experience with HALLOWEEN; now he was digging deeper—and, like Professor Quatermass, examining the darkness and devilish forces that hide within the marrow of our world. 

Kneale might have provided the inspiration, but he didn’t provide the science, which Carpenter culled from his own private reading.   At some point in the early to mid-1980s, he encountered a nonfiction book called The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature by American physicist Heinz Pagels.  In a 2012 interview, Carpenter remembered, “That book described the subatomic world and its physical properties—and lack of them—and my mind was blown!  I thought, ‘Where has this been?  Why has nobody ever talked about this before?’  I felt there was something about quantum mechanics and particle physics that could work as a horror film.”

Pagels wrote that contemporary discoveries in the field of quantum physics demanded “a new picture of reality requiring a conversion of our imagination.”  He explained that quantum reality is “rational but not visualizable,” and that it can only be perceived intellectually, through the use of symbols and metaphors.  He went even further to say the use of symbols and metaphors not only depicts, but dramatically alters, the deeper reality—because physicists have proven that, on the subatomic level, the mere act of observation changes the thing observed.  In other words: Storytelling can transform reality at the deepest and most fundamental level.

This makes me think of something that John Carpenter said to me when I interviewed him in 2008.  We were talking about some of his favorite movies of the 1950s and he said, basically, “You have to understand that these movies made me who I am—not just as a filmmaker, but as a person.”  I told him I understood, because his movies have done the same thing for me.  I am who I am because of certain storytelling influences, and I know from experience that movies—like all art—can change the world by changing the way we view the world.  That said, I can imagine (to a certain degree) how reading The Cosmic Code might have affected John Carpenter in the mid-80s.  I certainly remember how a similar book (Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics) affected my own worldview in the early 2000s; for me, there was a distinct “before” and “after.”  While a reader is fully engaged with a book like that, the past and the future are being rewritten for them.  

Pagels wrote a lot about the past and the future.  He suggested that if we mentally project ourselves back before the Big Bang, when the known universe was just “primordial matter soup,” then we can imagine/create an alternate beginning.  Instead of hearing the Biblical cry of “let there be light,” we might hear the scientist’s “let there be symmetry.”  According to Pagels, the Big Bang transformed the primordial matter soup into contradictory parts: something and nothing, energy and vacuum, matter and anti-matter.  Carpenter heard that message, and imported it into his film in the vaguely religious symbolism of “God” and “Anti-God.”  In PRINCE OF DARKNESS, the latter has an opportunity to infect the modern world.  And “infect” is the optimal word…. The plot of the film revolves around an ancient canister of primordial soup gone bad.  When that canister is opened, Evil begins to spread like a virus.  That’s a notion of apocalypse that a filmmaker can visualize, and one that horror movie audiences (in 2018, if not in 1987) can certainly understand.

In his book, Pagels relates two theories about the end of the world as we know it.  Either (1) we exist in an open universe that will expand forever, pulling us away from the sun until our planet freezes to death, or (2) we exist in a closed universe that will eventually contract, until everything is re-absorbed into primordial matter soup.  Of course, Pagels stipulates, neither of these things is going to happen for a very, very long time—so it shouldn’t keep us awake at night.

PRINCE OF DARKNESS prophesies a much nearer apocalypse, apparently culminating in the year 1999.  At that point, it seems, the virus has spread across the earth and the Anti-God reigns—but someone has learned how to project a warning back through time, into the dreams of the physicists studying the canister of evil goo in 1987.  This plot twist was apparently inspired by Gregory Benford’s 1980 sci-fi novel Timescape, about scientists who communicate across time by using tachyon particles.  In both stories, the messengers from the future deliver a warning to the past, along with a promise: You have a choice about what kind of world you co-create.  

Carpenter’s film revolves around two groups of people that are working to determine the fate of humanity.  On one side is the group of physicists, led by Professor Birack (Victor Wong, in a role that recalls his sage-like character Egg Shen in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA) and Donald Pleasance as Father Loomis (an obvious correlative to his character in HALLOWEEN).  On the other side is a horde of violent street people, led by shock rocker Alice Cooper.  These “bad guys” are pretty one-note, developed no further than the creepy-crawly bugs that live and breed in their tattered clothes.  (Once again, Dario Argento seems to be a significant influence.)  That apparently bothered some viewers, who complained that Carpenter was vilifying homeless people. 

Alice Cooper in PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987)

Taken within the context of a single film, it’s a fair criticism—but I think there’s a broader context worth considering.   In a 2003 interview, Carpenter explained his depiction of the street people: “At the time, I was reading an old review about how the brain works.  It was talking about schizophrenia, and it described a woman who was speaking in a different language and making motions with her hands as if guided by some other force.  It was really creepy to me, and I thought that the almost schizophrenics were maybe more susceptible to this power.”  In a 2012 interview, he reiterated, “The street people were meant to be schizophrenics that were susceptible to the evil’s power and influence.”  His goal was not to vilify the homeless or persons suffering from mental illness, but to convey how terrifying mental illness can be.  If you’ve ever been close to anyone who suffers from schizophrenia, then you understand the very real horror of belief constituting reality.  Schizophrenics live in a horror movie that no one else recognizes as a horror movie.

That’s a concept that Carpenter would go on to explore much more effectively in his 1995 film IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, and in his 2010 film THE WARD.  It’s also an idea that appears briefly in Heinz Pagels’ book.  Toward the end of The Cosmic Code, the author remembers a meeting he once had with a mentally-ill man who described to him “how alien beings from outer space had invaded the earth.” According to this young man, “aliens” were not little green or gray beings, but rather a “mental substance” that infects human minds, and controls human actions “through the creations of science and technology.”

Why did Pagels include this anecdote in a nonfiction book about quantum physics?  Because he recognized that there is some truth in the young man’s supposed “delusions.”  It is true, Pagels wrote, “that science and technology come from ‘outside’ the realm of human experience,” and he recognizes that “what may be perceived as threatening in this alien contact is that scientists, in reading the cosmic code, have entered into the invisible structures of the universe.”  When scientists study deep reality, they are changing deep reality.  By pursuing knowledge, they could be creating a gothic monster.  Of course, in a balanced universe, they could also be creating the monster’s opposite.

Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount in PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987)

Maria Casares and Jean Marais in ORPHEUS (1950)

On that note, it’s appropriate that one of the scientists in PRINCE OF DARKNESS tries to balance out the darkness with a contrasting light.   The light in Carpenter’s story is the relationship between two physicists who fall in love while the world is dying around them.  It is tempting to compare the love story between Brian Marsh (played by Jameson Parker) and Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount) to the relationship between the philosopher-poet and the female agent of death in Cocteau’s ORPHEUS.  In both films, the female character compassionately sacrifices herself at the end.  In ORPHEUS, that sacrifice allows the male character to survive and keep evolving.  In PRINCE OF DARKNESS, the sacrifice allows humanity at large to survive and keep evolving. 

For anyone who views PRINCE OF DARKNESS as a story about the Christian Devil, Catherine Danforth might be regarded as a Christ-like figure… but no true H.P. Lovecraft fan could leave it at that.  In the final scene of the film, Brian Marsh is haunted by visions—seemingly projected into his dreams from the year 1999—of Catherine as a kind of bride of the Anti-God.  His visions suggest that the woman he loves has been thoroughly corrupted, and will only return to “our world” as a devil.  The final emotional note in the film is a combination of heartbreak and horror.  When Marsh wakes up and approaches a nearby mirror, it is with overwhelming dread about what really exists on the other side.  Carpenter wisely leaves it at that; the rest is darkness and imagination.

John Carpenter Revisited: BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

Okay, confession time: I didn’t see BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA until 1997, more than a full decade after it was released in theaters.  I’m not really sure why.  I had seen all of Carpenter’s early films on video, and I lined up on opening night to see IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1994), VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1995), and ESCAPE FROM L.A. (1996) in the theater.  But, somehow, BIG TROUBLE just didn’t come up on my radar.  Until my first weekend at college. 

It was the late August 1997.  I didn’t know anyone on campus.  I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t leave campus.  I really had nowhere to go, except to the library or the campus movie theater.  I decided to check out the theater, and saw that the inaugural movie of that particular season of screenings was John Carpenter’s BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA.  As it turned out, I was a member of a very small group of people (mostly other freshmen, I presume) who ditched the start-of-semester parties to go to the movies.  And as soon as Jack Burton’s truck came barreling at the screen—accompanied by the rockin’ blues of JC himself—I felt right at home.

I’ve written a lot over the years about movies as comfort food.  I’m not sure if that’s really what this particular movie is for me, but I have a theory that that’s what it is for John Carpenter.  BIG TROUBLE isn’t really like any other title in his canon.  Oh sure, you can make the easy comparison to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK—because Kurt Russell headlines both films, and there’s an undeniable commonality between the heroes of both films.  Snake Plissken and Jack Burton are very different animals, but they’re both western-movie caricatures (based on Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, respectively), and the worlds they exist in are bold and brilliant fantasies.  ESCAPE exists in an alternate-reality America, a dystopian sci-fi realm.  BIG TROUBLE, on the other hand, exists in a surreal Chinese underworld, an exotic mythical realm every bit as rich as the wild, wild West—if not moreso.

Oliver Barrett cover art for the BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA / ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK crossover comic

I can only imagine what it must have been like to see this seemingly idiosyncratic combination of swords, sorcery and slapstick on the screen in an American theater in 1986.  By 1997, I’d already been exposed to Hong Kong action movies.  This was still a few years before Quentin Tarantino attempted something (tonally) similar with KILL BILL, but I was certainly aware of Jackie Chan and John Woo.  I’d even seen A CHINESE GHOST STORY, an early film by producer Tsui Hark—although I didn’t know what to make of it at the time.  American audiences in 1986—the hep ones, that is—had a smaller frame of reference.  Ditto John Carpenter, whose list of influences for BIG TROUBLE is a spectacular triple feature of Asian cinema classics:

The Shaw Brothers kung-fu epic FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH (1972).  Carpenter remembers, “Back in 1973 in the United States, there was a big deal over FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH, which was the first martial arts movie that had made it to our shores.  It was delightful.  It wasn’t just that the kung fu was fu, there was a sense of innocence to the Chinese cinema.  It was strange, yet bloody and violent and innocent at the time, plus with a ‘what is this exactly?’ vibe about it.”

SHOGUN ASSASSIN (1980), a Japanese samurai TV series recut as a grindhouse movie for American audiences.  Carpenter fans will recognize the anarchic spirit of this movie—as well as the three super-villains in giant hats.

And, most importantly, Tsui Hark’s ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (1983), which Carpenter himself has called “a real WIZARD OF OZ kind of Chinese film” and “the Chinese STAR WARS.”  This film, he says, was the biggest inspiration for BIG TROUBLE, because “it permitted me to say, ‘Ok, we can do anything here.’”

That “anything goes” spirit is the key to the success of Carpenter’s film, and it’s what makes BIG TROUBLE so much fun.  The filmmaker has said that the freewheeling atmosphere came partly from his experience as a new father.  The 1986 press kit quoted the director as follows: “I think a lot of this has to do with my relationship with my son, who is now two years old, and seeing the world a little through his eyes.  I am a person with a lot of darkness in his view of the world.  But through my son I can see a really ridiculous, fun world, an enormous, wondrous world, and that’s a little bit of what I wanted to get into this…. [also] I felt I’m getting older in my career, I’m almost forty years old, and I’d better do something nuts while I can.”  The cast, it seems, was just as willing to “go nuts.”  Kurt Russell, especially, has a field day here—taking chances that perhaps no other leading man would have taken in a big studio movie in 1986.  From what I can tell from reading The Official Making of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, everyone had fun making this movie, and their joie de vivre comes across on the screen.  Asian martial arts movies have never been my bag… but I love John Carpenter’s take on the genre.

Unfortunately—if not unsurprisingly—the film didn’t catch on with American moviegoers in the summer of 1986.  The big hits that year were TOP GUN, ALIENS, FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF, KARATE KID 2, STAND BY ME, CROCODILE DUNDEE, etc.  Carpenter’s film got lost in the shuffle—no thanks to a lousy marketing campaign orchestrated by 20^th Century Fox. The reception to the film was so cold that the filmmaker vowed (as he had after his last big-budget failure, THE THING) not to do anything like that again.  In this case, what he meant was that he didn’t want to make any more epic-scale blockbusters for major Hollywood studios; instead, he wanted to get back to making smaller, more intimate pictures.

This ad for BIG TROUBLE posed a question that contemporary viewers apparently didn't need an answer to.

A year later, he struck a four-film deal with Alive Films.  His first project under that deal was PRINCE OF DARKNESS, which—on the surface—couldn’t be more different from BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA.  PRINCE OF DARKNESS is a small, dark, brooding, claustrophobic, intensely-intellectual horror movie.  But it does have something in common with BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA.  The earlier film, like its primary inspiration ZU: WARRIORS, is rooted in an elaborate Chinese cosmology of good and evil—and that cosmology may, in turn, have inspired John Carpenter to develop his own elaborate cosmology for PRINCE OF DARKNESS. 

Here’s what the 1986 press kit had to say about the Chinese mythology behind BIG TROUBLE: “According to this mythology, perpetual life on earth is accorded not only to the forces of good, but also to the demons of evil—those from Hell.  It isn’t certain how many Hells there were for the Chinese, but Hell was ruled by an elaborate bureaucracy which meted out punishments to the evil exactly calculated to match their crimes.  Chinese mythology is filled with such people as the Dragon King, the Monkey God, the King of Dead, the Dark Warrior, the Green Dragon of the East and hundreds more.  To these, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA adds Lo Pan, the epitome of evil, who’s been around for over 2000 years, looking for a green eyed maiden to free him from an ancient curse and restore him to his physical body.”

In a similar fashion, PRINCE OF DARKNESS would be built upon the bones of Christian theology and (more generally) Western religious dualism.  To these elements, Carpenter would add his own scientific approach to evil—creating a completely new type of horror movie for the 1980s.

John Carpenter Revisited: STARMAN (1984)

Hero Initiative art by Cat Staggs (https://www.stormkingproductionsstore.com)

In a recent interview, John Carpenter justified the track selections for his retrospective album Anthology.   Perhaps the most surprising selection is the theme for his movie STARMAN—an odd choice because Jack Nitzsche, not Carpenter, composed it.  The director explains that he wasn’t allowed (by the studio brass) to compose the theme, because STARMAN was a romantic comedy and he was a “horror guy.”  Still, “It’s a theme to a movie that I’m very proud of.  My only romantic comedy, so why not.”

STARMAN is generally well-regarded, but not as frequently discussed as Carpenter’s other movies—probably because, in some ways, it doesn’t feel like a “John Carpenter movie.”  We think of Carpenter as an anti-romantic, arguably cynical, storyteller—and STARMAN is a boldly romantic, humanist film.  As the director himself has pointed out, it’s sort of the antithesis of THE THING (1982).  Just look at how the opening sequence of STARMAN contrasts with the earlier film; each one begins with an ominous UFO landing, and progresses to a grotesque alien transformation.  Everything after that is different.

Since THE THING was a critical and commercial disaster, doing something different was no doubt appealing to Carpenter, but the director also wanted to expand his range as a filmmaker—to break away from Naturalism, the “entrapment” theme, and the claustrophobic settings of his earlier films, and produce a bigger, brighter, more classical Hollywood movie.  It’s worth adding that Carpenter made STARMAN around the same time his son Cody was born, in the spring 1984—which may also partly explain his desire to tell a more optimistic story about the future of humanity.

By the time John Carpenter got involved, STARMAN had been in development hell for several years.  According to multiple sources, the biggest problem was that the script was deemed too similar to E.T. (1982).  Ironically, E.T. was the film that more or less sunk Carpenter’s THE THING.  Moviegoers in 1982 wanted friendly aliens and happy endings, not bleak visions of the apocalypse. 

Another irony: The directors who were attached to the project before Carpenter purportedly wanted to make STARMAN an effects-driven film, thereby marginalizing the love story.  Carpenter, the man behind the coldest effects-driven film of the 1980s, wanted to make a love story.  In contemporary interviews, he cited the following films as inspirations: THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) and David Lean’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945).  A fairy tale, a screwball comedy, and a romantic drama. 

This week I decided to watch STARMAN and IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT back to back, for the sake of comparison.  Both are “road movies,” and both are essentially romantic comedies… but not exactly the same kind of romantic comedies.  IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT is, famously, the movie that inaugurated the screwball comedy formula—which was successfully mined by John Carpenter’s idol Howard Hawks (in TWENTIETH CENTURY, BRINGING UP BABY and HIS GIRL FRIDAY).  Screwball comedies were a product of the Great Depression, and frequently explored socio-economic / class conflicts.  But what everyone remembers about them is the way they depicted the battle of the sexes—with women on top.

In IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, for example, Claudette Colbert is rich / naive and Clark Gable is poor / cynical.  Despite—or because of—the inescapable tension between them, they spend the movie fighting through their differences on an extended road trip.  By the end of the film, they realize they have fallen in love.  In STARMAN, by comparison, the male lead (Jeff Bridges) is alien / naïve and the female lead (Karen Allen) is human / cynical, but it’s still the tension between those worldviews that gives meaning to their journey.  Does that role reversal make STARMAN a screwball comedy, or a more traditional romantic comedy?

The question led me to Wes D. Gehring’s book Romantic Vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the Difference, which proposes that there are five key differences between screwball comedies and romantic comedies.   The first key difference is that screwball comedies put the emphasis on “funny,” “accentuating broad physical comedy and ludicrous events,” while traditional romantic comedies put the emphasis on “love,” and “is more reality based, with little or no slapstick.”  For most of its running time, STARMAN leans toward screwball comedy—with Bridges doing a great “fish out of water”/ “stranger in a strange land” routine that offers plenty of opportunities for physical comedy. 

On the other hand, STARMAN seems to invert the male / female dynamic of most screwball comedies.  Gehring writes, “More often than not, the screwball comedy male must suffer through a ritualistic humiliation at the hands of the zany heroine and/or the plot itself.”  IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT illustrates this point, but there are even better examples; THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937), BRINGING UP BABY (1938), and THE LADY EVE (1941) come to mind.   In STARMAN, it’s the female character who suffers at the hands of the zany male hero.

Which brings us to Gehring’s third key difference between screwball comedies and romantic comedies.  The former, he writes, are stocked with flakey eccentrics, while the latter feature more serious, down-to-earth characters.  As an example, Gehring contrasts screwball heroine Carole Lombard in MY MAN GODFREY (1936) with romantic comedy heroine Audrey Hepburn in SABRINA (1954).  Karen Allen’s character in STARMAN is certainly closer to Hepburn; both women are suicidally depressed at the beginning of the film.  Unlike Humphrey Bogart in SABRINA, however, STARMAN’s male love interest is a screwball hero.  I wonder if Carpenter was aware of mashing up genres in this way.

The fourth key difference between the two genres, according to Gehring, is the “dating ritual.”  Screwball comedies create conflict through mostly-humorous love triangles, while romantic comedies put more emphasis on character differences (or, in the case of BRIEF ENCOUNTER, the divisiveness of real-world responsibilities).  As STARMAN unfolds, the comedy recedes, the love story grows, and the divide between the lovers is much bigger than character differences. Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen belong to entirely different species, and the impact of their romance—and of their journey together—is not just personal, but universal.  At this point, STARMAN embraces its sci-fi / fantasy influences over comedic influences, and becomes a romantic fairy tale.

Gehring’s final difference between screwball comedies and romantic comedies is related to plot pacing; he says screwball comedies “escalate near the close,” while romantic comedies adopt “a turtle’s pace” in the home stretch.  STARMAN escalates, but not in the way that a screwball comedy rides off the rails into unrestrained nuttiness.  In its final act, Carpenter’s film is more like a dramatic thriller—something along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock’s THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS, a different kind of road movie with a built-in ticking clock.  Will they or won’t they get to Barringer Crater in Arizona before Bridges becomes permanently stranded on a hostile planet?  The resolution is reminiscent of E.T., but Carpenter keeps it short and sweet, avoiding mawkishness.

A few years ago, I went on my own STARMAN road trip....

... ending at Barrington Crater near Winslow, Arizona

The director is understandably proud of this tonal anomaly in his career—a fleeting glimpse of his romantic, sentimental side.  In a 1985 interview, he recognized in himself and in the culture at large a profound need for something magical to counteract the grim reality of post-Vietnam / post-Watergate America.  He told L.A. Weekly’s Michael Dare, “The Karen Allen character is like we all are.  She’s lost her husband; he’s dead; she’s sitting drinking wine and going over the old days again, and she doesn’t have any hope left.  She gains the hope by a new feeling from this man.  She falls in love with him.  She allows herself to be vulnerable and humble again…. This is something we all want: to say ‘Listen, it doesn’t matter how many nuclear warheads there are or how we’re treating the Russians.  It’s all going to work out.’  It’s a nice fantasy.”

But maybe that’s all it was for the filmmaker?  When I interviewed Carpenter in 2008 for my documentary Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, he responded to a question about the post-9/11 “culture of fear” by saying that he didn’t really believe in STARMAN’s conclusion that humanity is at its best when things are at their worst.  “That’s not true,” he said.  “I wish it was true.”  (That’s the romantic in him—the wishing.)  What the aftermath of 9/11 showed, he said, is that when people are afraid, humanity gets real ugly.  I think it’s safe to say that he’s not feeling any more optimistic these days.

The anti-romantic sentiment seems to inform Carpenter’s more famous films, those made before and after STARMAN… but I cling to something else he said in that 1985 interview with Michael Dare, about the ability to be both a pessimist and an optimist at the same time.  He explained, “I’m very pessimistic about the long term: we’re all alone and we die alone... But I’m a short-term optimist.  I gained this by making movies in which it’s all going to work out.”  A film like STARMAN, he concluded, “touches a little thing inside of us.  It was easy for me to tap into that, real easy.  It’s a departure, because people haven’t seen something like this from me before.  But now they have.” 

All these years later, STARMAN remains a very bright light in the middle of the filmmaker’s dark galaxy.

John Carpenter Revisited: CHRISTINE (1983)

Stephen Gervais cover art for Stephen King's novel CHRISTINE (https://suntup.press)

A few weeks ago, I saw John Carpenter’s CHRISTINE at The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood…. and the experience made me giddy.  Honestly, I was more excited seeing this movie writ large than I was seeing THE THING in 70mm on the same screen a few weeks earlier.  Why?  Not because I think CHRISTINE is a better film.  It’s not.  But I love it more.

When the movie was over, a group of cast and crew members went up on stage and tried to explain why CHRISTINE has developed such a strong cult following in recent years. William Ostrander, who plays Buddy Repperton, gave the best explanation.  He suggested that the revival is largely due to the enthusiasm of those who saw CHRISTINE for the first time when they were in middle school or early high school.  This explanation, at least, rings true for me.

I purchased a used VHS copy of CHRISTINE from my local video store when I was in 7^th or 8^th grade, and watched it until the cover fell apart and the tape broke.  There’s an easy explanation for why I loved it so much.  At the time, I identified with Arnie Cunningham, and related to his frustration with the world around him—a world largely defined by idiotic bullies and condescending authority figures.  

In a way, CHRISTINE is a film that derives its power from the ugliness of its characters—not just straight-ahead villains like Buddy Repperton and his goons, but ancillary characters like Roberts Blossom’s sleazy misanthropist George LeBay and Robert Prosky’s blustery hardass… Even Arnie’s control-freak mother, played by Christine Belford.  All of these characters exert an oppressive influence on Arnie, until his world practically begs to be destroyed. I think it’s safe to assume that most viewers my age got off on the “revenge of the nerd” scenario that follows.  CHRISTINE is an enthusiastic middle-finger to the reality of being an insecure teenager dealing with constant feelings of powerlessness and misdirected rage.  In that respect, it’s a pretty ugly film.

Roberts Blossom in CHRISTINE

But the ugliness is counterbalanced by Carpenter’s stylistic beauty—which is especially impressive in the second half of the film, as spit-polished Christine cruises perfectly-lit, rain-soaked streets in search of victims.  Reflections and camera flares give an alluring dreamlike quality to the escapist fantasy.  In the Q&A at The Egyptian, musical collaborator Alan Howarth noted that each camera flare has its own music cue, which further enhances that dreamlike quality.  Did I mention that the score for this film is one of Carpenter’s very best?  It’s simple, entrancing, unforgettable.  In short, CHRISTINE is a brilliant exercise in style, made by a cinematic genius at the top of his game. 

Regardless, John Carpenter himself has always expressed dissatisfaction with the film, citing it as one of only two films he’s directed that he doesn’t “own (MEMOIRS OF THE INVISIBLE MAN being the other).  In 2008, I pressed him on the subject—while professing my own love for CHRISTINE.  Carpenter basically shrugged and said, “It was a job.”  In a 2001 interview with Gilles Boulenger, he was harsher.  “Whether people think it’s good or bad,” he said, “I know in my heart I fucked it up because I was still wounded from THE THING.”  Obviously, I disagree.  

Stephen King and Christine

Despite my love for the film, however, I’m aware of its shortcomings—and two shortcomings in particular, which I think might sink the film for less nostalgic viewers.  Both are problems related to screenwriter Bill Phillips’ adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.  Carpenter has essentially claimed that CHRISTINE is Stephen King’s story, not his—but that’s not entirely fair, because of these deviations.

#1.  In King’s novel, the titular 1958 Plymouth Fury called “Christine” is literally haunted by the ghost of former owner Roland LeBay.  As Arnie Cunningham becomes obsessed with the car, LeBay’s ghost becomes a strong presence in his life—until Arnie begins to see LeBay’s rotting corpse sitting in the back seat, urging him to kill. 

Fearing that such imagery would be “silly,” Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Phillips decided to eliminate LeBay’s ghost from the screen story.  They crafted a new opening scene to suggest that the car was simply “born bad.”  According to producer Richard Kobritz, the new scene came about because “John recalled something Hitchcock had said about an assembly line sequence that he had always wanted to do.”  What Hitchcock wanted to do was make a scene where viewers watch a car get built from the ground up.  When the car is fully constructed, the door opens and a dead body tumbles out. 

I’m not sure why Carpenter thought this scene would be less silly than seeing a ghost in the back seat.  Today, he says he regretted the decision to eliminate LeBay’s ghost.  Bill Phillips apparently came to the same conclusion even sooner.  Almost immediately after finishing CHRISTINE, Phillips used a variation of the corpse-in-the-back-seat imagery in a 1983 PSA about drunk driving.

Whether the change was “wrong” or not, Carpenter was unquestionably committed to making a horror movie that didn’t rely on cheap shocks.  Instead, he wanted to make a character-based horror movie.  That’s why the second big adaptation problem is so glaring.  Although Carpenter got some great performances out of the lead actors (especially Keith Gordon, who is on fire here), the movie essentially abandons the main character arcs. 

The novel CHRISTINE is one of Stephen King’s most insightful character studies. Arnie Cunningham, Dennis Guilder and Leigh Cabot are fully fleshed-out teenagers, easy to empathize with and easy to love.  When their story turns to tragedy, it hurts—and the pain doesn’t come all at once; it comes on gradually, over a few hundred pages, as Arnie falls under the corrupting spell of Christine, and his friends and family realize that their loved one is slipping away forever.

In the movie, this shift happens abruptly, and off-camera.  One moment, we are watching pre-Christine Arnie (making nice with Darnell when the old fart offers him a job) and the next we are watching post-Christine Arnie (looking cool at the football game).  There’s nothing in between, and so viewers don’t get the emotional experience of Leigh and Arnie falling in and out of love, or of Dennis loving and losing his best friend. 

Bill Phillips reportedly wrote more character-building scenes, but they got cut at some point.  Recent DVD/Blu-Ray releases of the film feature some deleted scenes, but none of them do much to flesh out Arnie’s transformation.  Instead they focus on Dennis and Leigh’s budding romance.  In the book, that plot development pushes Arnie over the edge.  In the movie, the scenes are unnecessary because Arnie has already gone over the edge. 

In his response to the film, Stephen King essentially pinned the adaptation problems on the actor who plays Dennis (John Stockwell) and the actress who plays Leigh (Alexandra Paul), opining that their performances are “just sort of forgettable” and fail to “generate any real magnetism” with Arnie.  That may be true, but it’s not the biggest problem.  CHRISTINE the novel and CHRISTINE the movie are simply two very different beasts.  King’s story is mostly a melancholy tragedy and Carpenter’s movie is a stylish revenge story.  Once you recognize each version for what it is, I think it’s possible to enjoy both.  I love Stephen King’s CHRISTINE because it’s so heartfelt.  I love John Carpenter’s CHRISTINE because it’s so cool.  In my opinion, it has just as much style and panache as Brian DePalma’s CARRIE. 

Carrie and Christine (blood relatives?)

Although the Egyptian Theater paired CHRISTINE with MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE, that's why I decided to make CARRIE the second film on my double bill.  I realize that this is a different kind of double bill than the ones in my previous “Stephen King Revisited” essays—primarily because it de-emphasizes Carpenter’s authorship.  Pairing CHRISTINE with CARRIE reiterates the idea of CHRISTINE as a King movie rather than a Carpenter movie.  It also aligns Carpenter with a filmmaker that he doesn’t particularly like.

In a 1978 interview, Carpenter dismissed DePalma’s early horror films (SISTERS, OBSESSION, CARRIE) as unimaginative imitations of Hitchcock.  He opined, “Those pictures aren’t making creative use of the lessons Hitchcock has taught us.  They’re just trying to be copies of Hitchcock originals.”  During that early stage of in his career, DePalma was frequently maligned as a Hitchcock imitator.  But, then, so was Carpenter.  To a certain extent, DePalma embraced the label while Carpenter rejected it. 

Certainly, Carpenter learned the techniques of suspense from Hitchcock (as HALLOWEEN demonstrates), but the filmmaker insists that he is not the same type of storyteller.  In conversation with Gilles Boulenger, Carpenter criticized Hitchcock as a “cold” director, explaining, “His suspense scenes are just devoid of anything surprising.  As soon as you get his trick, there he is.  That’s just not my way of doing it.  I entertain much more connection with the Hawksian school.”  Hawks worked more closely with actors, and was generally inclined to throw out a detailed shooting plan in order to improvise and find the depth and warmth of his characters and their story. 

By 1997, Carpenter seemed to have modified his opinion of DePalma, including him on a list of revered filmmakers who have all had “bad days.”  He concluded, “It’s really all in your story.  If you have the right kind of story that lends itself to suspense, then you have it made.  When the story is something else, you’re kidding yourself.  You can play all the tried and true techniques, but they won’t work.”  That seems to sum up his feelings about CHRISTINE.  For him, it was too much of a cold stylistic exercise.  Simply a “bad day.”

For viewers who haven’t read the source novel, or who don’t instinctively identify with Arnie, he might be right.  On the other hand, if you love Carpenter’s unique style of visual storytelling, there’s plenty to love about CHRISTINE.  Even Stephen King, despite his completely understandable reservations with the story changes, concluded, “There’s still a lot of Carpenter […] the excitement that he can generate.  When the car’s going along the road, and it’s in flames, and it’s chasing these people, that’s pretty good.”

Damn right.