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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT ARCHIVE
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THINGS THAT GO HOWL IN THE ID Howl, howl, howl, howl! —King
Lear, Act V, Scene III by Harlan
Kennedy When werewolves come, they come not in single snouts but in battalions.
The new movie decade has ushered in a whole pack of lycanthropes, variously
dispersed through The Howling, Wolfen, An American Werewolf in London, and Full Moon High, and suddenly Western audiences
are reaching for their silver bullets as if time-warped back to the lupine
heyday of Lon Chaney. Miracle advances in special FX wizardry may satisfy some as the reason
for this sudden Hour of the Wolf. But it takes more than a chance upsurge of
jazzy genius in Hollywood's palpitating-pelt and elastic-nose departments to fully explain why so many screen
stars are currently being pursued through woods, zoos, or New York streets by
furry ravening mutants
or red-eyed hand-held cameras. If werewolves are loping onto the screen now – plus a fair-to-generous
rear-guard sprinkling of apes and Neanderthals and other marauding incarnations
of the id – it's not. just because maestros with papier-mâché and soluble
rubber are suddenly at large on Sunset Boulevard, it's because the age has suddenly invoked and
demanded these ogres. They're the snout-head of the New American Nightmare. Paws a pulse-beat to ponder: that currently coinciding with the spate
of lycanthropes and ids-in-sheep's-clothing is an oddly belated-looking rash
of "conspiracy" movies (Blow
Out, Cutter's Way, et al. ) vaguely genuflecting
to the bygone rumpus of Watergate; that the American political villain of the
last ten years with the most wolf-like features is Richard Nixon; and that a
Gothic strain of camouflaged horror – a motif shared by both Watergate and
the Vietnam war – runs through recent films as diverse as Altered States, Southern Confort, The Shining, Wolfen, and Shoot the Moon. American cinema in the early Eighties, grappling with the injuries and
images of a traumatic past twenty years, is in the grip of the most fascinating
obsession with split-personality horror themes in its history. Good guys vs. bad guys have long been the staple of
popular movies, but in the last two years Good and Evil have become knitted
up as never so closely or obsessively before in the same skin. Violence lives
thinly disguised by urbanity; still waters run deep with dangers and demons:
WASPs become wolves at full moon; virgin Nature throbs with silent menace;
bureaucracy wears a smiling face and secretes a sharp knife. The vengeful enemy concealed in Vietnam's virgin landscape and the horrors
just under the surface of Nixon Republicanism were the two great American
nightmares of the Sixties and Seventies. In both these theaters-of-evil, the
mega-threat was sewn into a camouflaged surface that gave no overt clue to
the hidden menace. The werewolf's features were disguised and undiscernible under their possessor's normal face. This post-Nam and post-Nixon nightmare imagery, rollercoasting
up through the unconscious, is now working itself prolifically into American
popular cinema. Raise the topic of Watergate openly today and it may be
greeted with a groan of fatigue, as of a dead horse, once well and truly
flogged by the media and long since dispersed to the boneyard. Yet films like Blow Out,
Cutter's Way, True Confessions, Missing, and Prince
of the City, testify that
the theme of cover-ups in high places is as vigorous as ever on our screens;
and that free-floating anxiety, Watergate-syndrome, is not just about the
little local trouble with burglary and tapes back in '72-'74 but about the
whole fear of what the Smooth Face of Power, with the right make-up, can
conceal in the way of dormant horrors, galloping chicanery, atavistic guilt,
and pushbutton apocalypse. Watergate wasn't a once-only explosion, it was
the detonator to a new Era of Anxiety. And Republicanism redivivus
in Reagan – Hollywood enthroned in the White House – reminds us
that the anxieties are there today. (Significantly, polls show that a majority
of Americans disagree with Reagan's policies but approve of him: he's the
perennial movie star the public likes no matter how many had pictures he appears
in.) Likewise Vietnam. A war that closed its military books seven years ago
has only lately begun to release its demons into pop culture: in guerrilla
horror films (Friday the 13th),
in tales of gauntlet terror (Southern Comfort), in a Cinema of Sudden
Slaughter, where sense and civilization are only a twig-snap from chaos and calamity. The horror-thriller genre has always pitched its camp in the crossfire
between the civilized and the savage, between rational reassurance and
Pop-out Primitive. But in today's cinema the special new horror comes from
the close elision of these opposites. It's hard to peel them apart. They're
symbiotic, they share the same skin, they're faces closely superimposed one
on the other. When those oh-so-flawless American features warp into feral ferocity in
The Howling or American Werewolf, it's as if maidenly Red Riding Hood has herself
mutated into the Big Bad Wolf. Shining WASP decency becomes a raging Western
id. It's munched on Watergate and Vietnam for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,
and it reaches between-meals for mouthfuls of even maturer
racial guilt: Indian genocide. In both political resonance and guerrilla-war imagery, there's a clear
and strong rapport between the Vietnam war and the Indian wars, and plentiful
reason why films that fret about the destruction of the Indians should have
swelled up in the wake of Vietnam. Both Wolfen and The Shining feature
buildings erected (or about to be erected) on old Indian territory: hunting
ground in the one, burial ground in the other. Both movies release
up-and-at-'em ogres seemingly galvanized by the
notion that the modern age is trespassing on or violating the old. And in
both films there are festoons of iconography swagged
around the idea of America Past and Present: in Wolfen
the Battery Park memorial windmill and weather vanes, celebrating the
first Dutch settlers, in The Shining everything from the
Stars-and-Stripes flag in the hotel manager's office to the Apollo T-shirt of
little Danny. American history in these films is the ghost under the tower
block, the vengeful dead under the luxury hotel – just as American paranoia
in the more explicit Vietnam or Watergate films is the snarling id under the
smiling superego. The notion of violence or vengeance lying just below the surface of
"normality" is fiercely evident in the glut of
kids-to-the-slaughter horror movies: the Friday the 13ths, Burnings, and Halloweens. It's a mark of the post-Vietnam
age that horror films have moved away from up-market Grand Guignol, where your course through carnage is
charted by classy music crescendoes or florid lighting changes or symphonic suspense. Gothic has gone
cheap, young, and outlaw. Rural or small-town settings camouflage the menace
of sudden ambush, National Service-age youngsters camp in unknown territory,
and tactical weapons (in the anything-goes context of guerrilla war) have a
crazy, desperate, ingenious extemporaneity, anything from shears to axes to
ice picks to shovels. The camouflaged menace is never more than a few trees
away. Evil lurks limned in the landscape like the outline of a face in a
puzzle drawing, or like the wolf-snout ready to snarl out from a normal face
at full moon. In Southern Comfort the conflation of Vietcong and Indians,
hinted at in many of the horror-ambush movies, becomes even more explicit.
The Cajuns are Indians by name, if not by literal genealogy, and in
Walter Hill's film they're clearly spiritual scions of the soundless savages
– cat-like, nature-wise, at one with the landscape, never snapping a twig –
who've stalked American myth and fiction since James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper couldn't have foreseen that
Indians or their likeness would rise up again in the 1960s on the opposite
side of the world, hurling the specter of genocidal guilt in America's first
lost war – and catalyzing a rash of guerrilla-gauntlet, vengeance-is-mine
Z-movie shockers. The oddly two-way distribution of guilt in these films – a reminder of
the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam war, where violence was never validated
for the U.S. by the sense of being in a "just war" – is apparent in
the fact that the "hero"-victims are often presented as callow,
strident, games-playing outsiders and the villains as once-injured parties.
The mother of a drowned boy (Friday
the 13th); the son of a killed miner (My Bloody Valentine); the
witness of a murdered sister (Prom
Night). So that there's an unprecedented reflexivity of
"blame" between murderer and victims in the new horror genre and
(usually) a degree of grisly, idiot pathos in even the most rebarbative of their ogres. If the Vietnam war catalyzed a whole ancestry of racial quilts in the
areas of genocide and bloody colonial conquest, Watergate catalyzed a
slightly different set of anxieties. The id-under-the-skin in Blow Out and
Cutter's Way is compounded
more of fear, less of guilt: a swarm of dormant terrors about the enormities
that Big Government or Top People can enact under the protective carapace and
charisma of high office. In Cutter's Way the oil-millionaire "villain"
rides a tall horse and locks up his eyes behind mirror-lensed
glasses. They glint from on high like the flashy, glassy anonymity of his skyscraping
office block. Blow Out, a thriller-comic
summation of the whole recent S.O.S.O.S. genre (Save-our-Ship-of-State),
shares the same expressive strewing of bric-a-brac Americana, historical and
political, as The Shining and Wolfen
(a red-white-and-blue color scheme in Vilmos Zsigmond's photography, the Liberty Day background)
but the history it sculpts is more recent. De Palma takes the dour
headline realities of Watergate, and Chappaquiddick, and Dallas,
and Tabulates them to create a rainbow-hued fairytale that might have been
painted by Roy Lichtenstein and scripted in comic-strip speech-bubbles
bristling with exclamation marks. The faux-naif style chimes with a
movie which tells us how close under the surface of bureaucratic
sophistication (the white-collar conspiracy bosses dealing strictly in
character assassination) is runaway dementia and mad purgatorial zeal (John
Lithgow as the wind-up hit-man, a Gordon Liddy act-alike, dealing strictly in real assassination). The cover-up theme in Blow Out finds a symbolic embodiment in the
Nancy Allen character's preoccupation with make-up – cosmetic camouflage.
"This took me two hours," she says in her wide-eyed drawl.
"It's the no make-up look." And cosmetic ingenuity has cropped up
as a theme in another recent shocker, Dead and Buried, wherein gorily murdered corpses in the small town of
Potter's Bluff are restored,
rebeautifed, and reanimated by master mortician
Jack Albertson. Indeed the current image of American society as a schizoid,
Jekyll-and-Hyde organism concealing grisly truths beneath a smooth and
smiling surface spreads well beyond even films with a semi-explicit nod to
Vietnam and Watergate. If the neo-Nam and the neo-Nixon movies are about the
beast in the governmental machine, a film like Mommie
Dearest privatizes and personalizes the same id-under-the skin dualism. Moviegoers know Joan Crawford as a lacquered and laminated goddess who
might have been modeled on the Metropolis robot. But whisk off the
mask and the maquillage and the
finery, and a domestic she-wolf is revealed in all her roughery
– a harpy with the Harpic, a ravisher of rose-gardens and a layer-on of coat-hangers on the body
of America's youth. It's a werewolf story in showbiz clothing. And in Shoot the Moon, the All-Anglo-American Dad needs
only a locked door or a glance from ex-wife to lover to turn into a slavering child-beater (another coat-hanger) or a one-man demolition derby. In the Eighties, when the Moral Majority torpedoes your cornflakes
every morning with salvoes of
pietistic wisdom, it's no wonder that the battle between hypocritic hygiene and human reality is fiercer than
ever. Religious tub-thumping and post-Nixon Republicanism have approached
the altar of high office together; and there they stand, radiant in their
super ego-tism. The id, meanwhile, bashes furiously
at the church doors, protesting the banns and ready to answer a wedding with
a walpurgisnacht. Iconically, it's no coincidence that werewolves have
loped onto the screen in the red-eyed, sharp-toothed wake of the prolific vogue
for vampirism just passed. Two or three years ago it was Icon Dracula,
with his quick-change acts
from suavity to savagery. But once
audiences had supped their fill with Carpathian horrors – and cloak-swishings and toothsome smiles and blood transfusions –
there was a clear logic in upping the ante with werewolves. The demon duality
of nature is the same, but there's a headier charge in human bipeds turning
into furry four-footers. They are not representatives of an older, alien,
undead race; they are humans who, once a moon, go loony and lupy. It comes from something in their spirit and
beyond their will. The current vein of Hollywood moral schizophrenia where Evil is a
skin-depth under Good has produced an astonishing spud of potent pop-horror
imagery. The writhing palpitations under "normal skin, the chameleon
killer hidden in the trees, the racial history coiled vengeful and vigilant
under the new cities. These images have erupted in their full glory just at the turning point
where we leave the 1970s and enter the 1980s. We've closed the cage door (or
so we hope) on a double-decade of slippery unclassifiable nightmares, and we
can now look through the bars and scrutinize them. The first response is
likely to be, and has been, visceral and immediate: an unleashing into
legend and a pop catharsis. The Sixties and Seventies were a time of
debacles for America. These films are the dream-therapy nightmares slowly
sorting out the iconography. COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE MARCH-APRIL 1982 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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