MOVIES MADE ME #27: THE TERMINATOR / ALIENS

I could write at length about both of these films... but I won't. John Kenneth Muir recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of ALIENS with an in-depth post that I can't expect to top. I imagine he'll be equally thorough in his forthcoming post on THE TERMINATOR, due the week of August 8th as part of his summer-long celebration of filmmaker James Cameron. Instead of repeating his analyses, I'm simply going to reminisce...

I became aware of THE TERMINATOR shortly after it was released into theaters in the fall of 1984, but not because I saw the film or even the previews for it. Instead, I heard the entire plot -- scene by scene -- from a teenage girl in the neighborhood who used to babysit me and my brother when we were kids. I remember sitting in a makeshift "fort" (an old table with a huge blanket tossed over it) in the basement of my childhood home, listening intently while Samantha spun a wild yarn about a robot from the future who travels through time to carry out a violent abortion. She had just seen the movie the night before, and she spared no detail... But I didn't believe a word of it.

It was a great story. No question. I think I held my breath the entire time, eager to hear what came next. But I didn't believe that she'd actually seen all of this on a movie screen. I figured she had to be making it up... I thought the story was WAY too far-fetched to be an actual movie.

Years later, when I finally saw THE TERMINATOR, I was amazed that the film lived up to the hype I'd generated in my own brain. What really blew me away was the final act, when the Terminator sheds his Schwarzenegger skin and becomes a stop-motion animated skeleton (an upgrade on the old Ray Harryhausen movies)... I remember being utterly horrified by the thought that this thing simply could not be killed. That final act was a nightmare, pure and simple... There was no logic, no reason, no hope.

Watching THE TERMINATOR the New Beverly Theater a few nights ago, I realized how much it has in common with Cameron's subsequent film ALIENS. Both take place almost entirely in the dark (the noir aspect), both revolve around a super-human threat, and both feature androids (which get ripped in half at the end). In ALIENS, the android is benevolent... so you could perhaps view ALIENS as, among other things, a test run for TERMINATOR 2.

The first time I saw ALIENS was on the small screen. My father rented the home video a few years after it was released. This was a big deal for me because I was still too young to watch R-rated movies. I was surprised that he had picked it out. I think he might have had a thing for Sigourney Weaver, though I never asked. Whatever the cause, I wasn't complaining. Dad rarely wanted to watch the kind of movies I was interested in (action, horror, sci-fi), so the memory of that lazy summer afternoon stays with me.

As I saw it, he had Sigourney Weaver and I had Bishop. Lance Henriksen's character is the kid in the story. The story focuses mostly on Newt, the surrogate daughter for Sigourney's character, but I didn't care about her because she existed only to serve the Ripley's arc -- to set off her mothering instincts. Bishop was a self-contained character. He wasn't part of the tribe. He was the one who was trying to prove himself, trying to earn the approval of the adults around him. I could relate to that, and watching the movie with my dad made the experience even more poignant.

It's different watching the movie as an adult... I still identify with Bishop more than the human characters, but now it seems to me that he shouldn't have to try so hard. From the very beginning, he's more human than the humans. When the New Beverly screening was over, I was left wondering how James Cameron was able to make the leap from the Terminator to Bishop in just two films, spaced only a year apart. In the first film, the technology of the future is a source of profound fear. In the second film, the technology of the future is the light in the dark. Watching these two films back to back, it seems like there's an evolution going on in the storyteller's mind - like he's learning to trust hope. Or maybe that was just me.

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.

Downtown Los Angeles, Part 2: Literary L.A.

My friend Ben is a collector – of books, movies, music, you name it. When I was in high school and college, I often went to his house instead of going to the library, because I knew I could trust that everything on his shelves was worth checking out. One day I went looking for something to read, and pulled two titles: Charles Bukowski’s Women and Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal. There was no browser-friendly blurb on the back of Bukowski’s book, so I checked the inside covers for more information. What I got was a list of the author’s other works – with titles like The Days Run Away like Wild Horses over the Hills / Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness / Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame / Love is a Dog from Hell / You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense. Bukowski was obviously a guy who wrote from the gut. I sat down, started reading, and didn’t move until I had finished the book. Then I went out and bought another one.

The same thing happened to Bukowski, while he was scanning the shelves at the Los Angeles Public Library. One day, he picked up John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust and he couldn’t put it down. Fante wrote his novels from the perspective of an alter ego named Arturo Bandini: a strong-willed Italian-American who moves from his childhood home in Boulder, Colorado to downtown Los Angeles, to become a writer. Four novels outline Bandini's life from childhood to Hollywood: Wait Until Spring, Bandini (published in 1938), The Road to Los Angeles (written before all the others, but not published until 1985), Ask the Dust (published in 1939), and Dreams of Bunker Hill (published in 1982).

Ask the Dust chronicles the aspiring writer’s “lean days of determination” in the downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill, in the 1930s. The first chapter charts his daily routine from Angel’s Flight to Olive Street and 5th, past the Biltmore to the Central Library, where he imagines seeing his name among the “big boys” on the spine of a book. Later, he meets Camilla Lopez in a bar on nearby Spring Street, before returning home to the Alta Loma Hotel, where he looks out over the city of Los Angeles and begins to write. Fante outlines his novel as follows: “Story of a girl I once loved who loved someone else, who in turn despised her.” Sounds simple enough, right? But the voice of Arturo Bandini – an ego-maniac without the ego – makes it unforgettable.

After we went on our Broadway Theater Tour on Saturday, we roamed the neighborhood to see where Fante lived and worked. Angel’s Flight (“the world’s shortest railway”) doesn’t operate anymore, and Bunker Hill exists only in name. The neighborhood was one of the city’s first suburbs – founded in the 1880s, when the streets were lined with beautiful Victorian houses. By 1940, it had become a slum. That year, Fante wrote a memorial for his old neighborhood: “Everything changes, and for better or worse the change came for me and the years have trickled away, and Bunker Hill is only a memory. But it lives on. It gave my thought food and drink. It sated my hunger for life...”

In 1955, the city started a LONG redevelopment project (still ongoing…) to turn the neighborhood into a business district. Now, instead of Victorian houses, there are skyscrapers looming above Pershing Square. In the early 80s, around the same time that Fante wrote his last Bandini novel, Charles Bukowski and publisher City Lights introduced Ask the Dust to a new generation of readers. Today it is considered one of the best early examples of Los Angeles literature – published the same year as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.

Despite all the changes, there are still fans who are celebrating Fante’s legacy and what’s left of his Bunker Hill. This summer, an L.A.-based company called Esotouric started offering bus tours of Fante and Bukowski’s downtown haunts. The building where Fante wrote Ask the Dust is still there. So is the building where Bukowski wrote Women… though just barely. Both buildings, which are vacant except for transient squatters, have been slated for demolition. For information and photos, see the Esotouric founder’s blog: Two or Three Things I Know about Her.

This blog also led me to a site called “Nobody Reads in L.A.” I swear I visited the website a few days ago, but now it seems to be gone. Maybe that’s proof positive of the title’s cynical theory? Too bad, because there are plenty of great books written in and about Los Angeles. I just finished a 1928 book called Spider Boy by Carl Van Vechten, one of the first novels to skewer the Hollywood myth. I’m convinced that it was a major inspiration for Billy Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard. Other recent discoveries: If He Hollers, Let Him Go by Chester Himes (a glimpse into WWII-era San Pedro) and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (forerunner of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero). These are some of the best works of fiction I’ve read in years… maybe since I was in college, chasing Bukowski with other fierce-minded writers like Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Joseph Heller, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Hubert Selby Jr., Larry Crews… My memories of reading these authors for the first time are as vivid as Fante’s memories of Bunker Hill. Put simply: They fed my hunger for life.

This is a mural near the intersection of 3rd and Broadway. The subject is actor Anthony Quinn... who I think looks a bit like Charles Bukowski.

Pershing Square - then (photo from the Los Angeles Public Library)

Pershing Square - now

Angel’s Flight - then (photo from www.yesterdayla.com)

Angel’s Flight - now

Bunker Hill steps

Los Angeles Public Library (view from the top of Bunker Hill)

Just to give you a sense of how big this library really is.... here's the stairwell to the lower levels.


Behind the modern art sculpture is the Westin-Bonaventure Hotel, recognizable from the beginning of "The Terminator." Zoom in and you can see that it has elevator shafts on the outside of the building. (View from the top of Bunker Hill)