Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Category: Socially Conscious Storytelling (Page 1 of 2)

No, Virginia, “Die Hard” Is Not a Christmas Movie

December 20, 2023 / / 25 Comments

Ah, it’s that magical time of year!  When the Hudson hawk nips at the nose, and the skyline over the New Jersey Palisades bruises by midafternoon.  When chimney smoke from private houses spices the air, and strings of colored lights adorn windows and fire escapes.  And, of course, when the Internet engages in its annual bullshit debate as to whether perennial holiday favorite Die Hard, currently celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary, is a Christmas movie.  And since “bullshit debates” are my brand…

In fourth grade, I scored what was, by 1980s standards, the holy grail:  a best friend with HBO.  Over the following five years, I slept over at his house every weekend, where we watched R-rated action movies into the night.  Whatever HBO was showing that week, we delighted in it, no matter how idiotic (Action Jackson) or forgettable (Running Scared).  For a pair of preadolescent boys, that Saturday-night cinematic grab bag abounded with illicit wonders.

Much as we enjoyed those movies, though, they were for the most part—this isn’t a criticism—ephemeral crap.  We howled at their profane jokes and thrilled to their improbable set pieces, but seldom if ever revisited any of them (Beverly Hills Cop [1984] and its sequel [1987] being a rare exception), and certainly none inspired us to playact their scenarios as we had with PG-rated adventures Ghostbusters (1984) and Back to the Future (1985).  They entertained us, sure, but didn’t exactly impress upon our imaginations in any lasting or meaningful way…

That is, not until an action thriller with the snarky guy from Moonlighting (1985–1989) and Blind Date (1987) came along.  I still remember seeing Die Hard (1988) for the first time, on a thirteen-inch television with side-mounted mono speaker at my friend’s Bronx apartment.  As a viewing experience, it was about as low-def as they come, but that didn’t diminish the white-knuckled hold the movie had on us; we watched it in astonished silence from beginning to end.  From that point on—and this was the year no less than Tim Burton’s Batman had seized the zeitgeist, and our longstanding favorites Ghostbusters and Back to the Future got their first sequels—Die Hard was almost all we could talk about.

At the time, Manhattan College was in the process of erecting a twelve-story student residence overlooking Van Cortlandt Park, and we would gather with our JHS pals at the construction site on weekends, running around the unfinished edifice with automatic squirt guns, playing out the movie’s gleefully violent plot.  Hell, at one point or another, every multistory building in the neighborhood with a labyrinthine basement and rooftop access became Nakatomi Plaza, the setting of a life-and-death battle staged and waged by a group of schoolboys, our imaginations captive to the elemental premise of Die Hard.

We obsessed over that fucking movie so exhaustively, we passed around this still-in-my-possession copy of the pulp-trash novel it was based on—Roderick Thorp’s Nothing Lasts Forever (1979)—until every one of us had had a chance to read it:

The now-battered copy of “Nothing Last Forever” I bought in 1989 at the long-gone Bronx bookstore Paperbacks Plus

The thirteen-year-old boys of the late ’80s were far from the only demographic taken with Die Hard.  The movie proved so hugely popular, it not only spawned an immediate sequel in 1990 (which we were first in line to see at an appallingly seedy theater on Valentine Avenue), but became its own subgenre throughout the rest of that decade.  Hollywood gave us Die Hard on a battleship (Under Siege), Die Hard on a plane (Passenger 57), Die Hard on a train (Under Siege 2:  Dark Territory), Die Hard on a mountain (Cliffhanger), Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a cruise ship (Speed 2:  Cruise Control), Die Hard in a hockey arena (Sudden Death), Die Hard on Rodeo Drive (The Taking of Beverly Hills), Die Hard at prep school (Toy Soldiers)…

Christ, things got so out of control, even Beverly Hills Cop, an established action franchise predating Die Hard, abandoned its own winning formula for the third outing (scripted by Steven E. de Souza, co-screenwriter of the first two Die Hards) in favor of a half-assed “Die Hard in an amusement park” scenario.  This actually happened:

Eddie Murphy returns as Axel Foley—sort of—in “Beverly Hills Cop III” (1994)

None of those films has had the staying power of the original Die Hard.  Mostly that’s owed to Die Hard being a superior specimen of filmmaking.  Director John McTiernan demonstrates uncommonly disciplined visual panache:  He expertly keeps the viewer spatially oriented in the movie’s confined setting, employing swish pans and sharp tilts to establish the positions of characters within a given scene, as well as imbue the cat-and-mouse of it all with breathless tension.

McTiernan consistently sends his hero scuttling to different locations within the building—stairwells, pumprooms, elevator shafts, airducts, the rooftop helipad—evoking a rat-in-a-cage energy that leaves the viewer feeling trapped though never claustrophobic.  The narrative antithesis of the globetrotting exploits of Indiana Jones and James Bond, Die Hard is a locked-room thriller made with an ’80s action-movie sensibility.  It was and remains a masterclass in suspense storytelling—often imitated, as the old saying goes, never duplicated.

Perhaps another key reason for the movie’s durability, its sustained cultural relevance, is owed to its (conditional) status as a celebrated Christmas classic.  Like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and Love Actually (2003), Die Hard is a feel-good film—albeit with a considerably higher body count—one is almost compelled to watch each December.  Yet whereas nobody questions any of the aforementioned movies’ culturally enshrined place in the holiday-movie canon—nor that of cartoonishly violent Home Alone (1990)—Die Hard’s eligibility seems perennially under review.

Why does the debate around Die Hard die hard… and is it, in fact, a Christmas movie?

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Highway to Hell:  Car Culture and Hollywood’s Hero-Worship of the Automobile

June 21, 2023 / / 44 Comments

With road-trip season upon us once again, here’s an examination of how American car culture has been romanticized by the entertainment industry; how automobiles, far from enablers of freedom and individuality, are in fact “turbo-boosted engines of inequality”; and how Hollywood can help remedy an ecocultural crisis it’s played no small role in propagating.

In any given episode, the action reliably starts the same way:  a wide shot of the Batcave, Batmobile turning on its rotating platform to face the cavemouth, camera panning left as the Dynamic Duo descend the Batpoles.  Satin capes billowing, Batman and Robin hop into their modified 1955 Lincoln Futura, buckle up—decades before it was legally required, incidentally—and the engine whines to life as they run through their pre-launch checklist:

ROBIN:  Atomic batteries to power.  Turbines to speed.

BATMAN:  Roger.  Ready to move out.

A blast of flame from the car’s rear thruster—whoosh!—and off they’d race to save the day.

By the time the 1980s had rolled around, when I was first watching Batman (1966–1968) in syndicated reruns, every TV and movie hero worth his salt got around the city in a conspicuously slick set of wheels.  Muscle cars proved popular with working-class ’70s sleuths Jim Rockford (Pontiac Firebird) and Starsky and Hutch (Ford Gran Torino).  The neon-chic aesthetic of Reagan era, however, called for something a bit sportier, like the Ferrari, the prestige ride of choice for Honolulu-based gumshoe Thomas Magnum (Magnum, P.I.) and buddy cops Crockett and Tubbs (Miami Vice).  The ’80s were nothing if not ostentatiously aspirational.

Even when cars were patently comical, they came off as cool despite themselves:  the Bluesmobile, the 1974 Dodge Monaco used in The Blues Brothers (1980); the Ectomobile, the 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel in Ghostbusters (1984); the Wolfmobile, a refurbished bread truck that Michael J. Fox and his pal use for “urban surfing” in Teen Wolf (1985).

The DMC DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future is clearly meant to be absurd, designed in the same kitchen-sink spirit as the Wagon Queen Family Truckster from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), but what nine-year-old boy in 1985 didn’t want to be Michael J. Fox, sliding across the stainless-steel hood and yanking the gull-wing door shut behind him?  And like the characters themselves, the DeLorean evolved with each movie, going from nuclear-powered sports car (Part I) to cold-fusion flyer (Part II) to steampunk-retrofitted railcar (Part III).  “Maverick” Mitchell’s need for speed didn’t hold a candle to Marty McFly’s, who’s very existence depended on the DeLorean’s capacity to reach 88 miles per hour.

Vehicles that carried teams of heroes offered their own vicarious pleasure.  Case in point:  the 1983 GMC Vandura, with its red stripe and rooftop spoiler, that served as the A-Team’s transpo and unofficial HQ—a place where they could bicker comically one minute then emerge through the sunroof the next to spray indiscriminate gunfire from their AK-47s.  The van even had a little “sibling”:  the Chevrolet Corvette (C4) that Faceman would occasionally drive, marked with the same diagonal stripe.  Did it make sense for wanted fugitives to cruise L.A. in such a distinct set of wheels?  Not really.  But it was cool as hell, so.

The Mystery Machine was the only recurring location, as it were, on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969), and the van’s groovy paint scheme provided contrast with the series’ gloomy visuals.  Speaking of animated adventures, when once-ascetic Vietnam vet John Rambo made the intuitive leap from R-rated action movies to after-school cartoon series (1986), he was furnished with Defender, a 6×6 assault jeep.  Not to be outdone, the most popular military-themed animated franchise of the ’80s, G.I. Joe:  A Real American Hero (1983–1986), featured over 250 discrete vehicles, and the characters that drove them were, for the most part, an afterthought:

With the debut of the 3 ¾” figures in 1982, Hasbro also offered a range of vehicles and playsets for use with them.  In actual fact, the 3 ¾” line was conceived as a way to primarily sell vehicles—the figures were only there to fill them out!

‘3 ¾” Vehicles,’ YoJoe!

But who needs drivers when the vehicles themselves are the characters?  The protagonists of The Transformers (1984–1987) were known as the Autobots, a race of ancient, sentient robots from a distant planet that conveniently shapeshifted into 1980s-specific cars like the Porsche 924 and Lamborghini Countach, among scores of others.  (The premise was so deliriously toyetic, it never occurred to us to question the logic of it.)  Offering the best of both G.I. Joe and The Transformers, the paramilitary task force of M.A.S.K. (1985–1986), whose base of operations was a mountainside gas station (what might be described as Blofeld’s volcano lair meets the Boar’s Nest), drove armored vehicles that transformed into… entirely different vehicles.

Many movies and shows not only featured cars as prominent narrative elements, but literally took place on the road:  Vacation.  Mad Max (1979).  Smokey and the Bandit (1977).  CHiPs (1977–1983).  Sometimes the car was so important it had a proper name:  General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–1985).  Christ, sometimes it was the goddamn series costar:  KITT on Knight Rider (1982–1986).  Shit on David Hasselhoff’s acting ability all you want, but the man carried a hit TV show delivering the lion’s share of his dialogue to a dashboard.  Get fucked, Olivier.

1980s hero-car culture at a glance

As a rule, productions keep multiple replicas of key picture cars on hand, often for different purposes:  the vehicle utilized for dialogue scenes isn’t the one rigged for stunts, for instance.  It’s notable that the most detailed production model—the one featured in medium shots and closeups, in which the actors perform their scenes—is known as the “hero car.”  And why not?  Over the past half century, Hollywood has unquestionably programmed all of us to recognize the heroism of the automobile.

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Book Review:  “Heat 2” by Michael Mann + Meg Gardiner

December 15, 2022 / / 19 Comments

This article discusses plot details and scene specifics from Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) and his novel Heat 2 (2022).

John Carpenter’s dystopian classic Escape from New York (1981), set in 1997, opens with an expository intertitle:  “1988—The Crime Rate in the United States Rises Four Hundred Percent.”  Though that grim prognostication amounted to an exaggeration, the issue itself had nonetheless become a big deal here in the real world by the early 1990s:

In 1993, the year President Clinton took office, violent crime struck nearly 11 million Americans, and an additional 32 million suffered thefts or burglaries.  These staggering numbers put millions more in fear.  They also choked the economic vitality out of entire neighborhoods.

Politically, crime had become one of the most divisive issues in the country.  Republicans called for an ever more punitive “war on drugs,” while many Democrats offered little beyond nebulous calls to eliminate the “root causes” of crime.

David Yassky, “Unlocking the Truth About the Clinton Crime Bill,” Opinion, New York Times, April 9, 2016

Clinton’s response was the measurably effective (if still controversial) Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, otherwise known as the 1994 Crime Bill, coauthored by Joe Biden, the provisions of which—and this is just a sampling—added fifty new federal offenses, expanded capital punishment, led to the establishment of state sex-offender registries, and included the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (since expired) and the Violence Against Women Act.

It was an attempt to address a big issue in America at the time:  Crime, particularly violent crime, had been rising for decades, starting in the 1960s but continuing, on and off, through the 1990s (in part due to the crack cocaine epidemic).

Politically, the legislation was also a chance for Democrats—including the recently elected president, Bill Clinton—to wrestle the issue of crime away from Republicans.  Polling suggested Americans were very concerned about high crime back then.  And especially after George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election in part by painting Dukakis as “soft on crime,” Democrats were acutely worried that Republicans were beating them on the issue.

German Lopez, “The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained,” Vox, September 29, 2020

Given the sociopolitical conditions of the era, it stands to reason—hell, it seems so obvious in hindsight—the 1990s would be a golden age of neo-noir crime cinema.  The death of Michael Corleone, as it happens, signified a rebirth of the genre itself; Martin Scorsese countered the elegiac lethargy—that’s not a criticism—of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part III with the coke-fueled kineticism of Goodfellas (both 1990).  Henry Hill shared none of Michael’s nagging reluctance about life in the Italian Mafia; he always wanted to be a gangster!

Reasoning that was probably true of audiences, too—as an author of horror stories, I certainly appreciate a healthy curiosity for the dark side—Hollywood offered vicarious trips into the criminal underworlds of Hell’s Kitchen, in Phil Joanou’s State of Grace (1990), and Harlem, in Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City (1991), both of which feature undercover cops as major characters.  So does Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992), about a police officer (Laurence Fishburne) posing as an L.A. drug dealer as part of a broader West Coast sting operation.

The line between cop and criminal, so clearly drawn in the action-comedies of the previous decade (Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, Stakeout, Running Scared), was becoming subject to greater ambiguity.  In no movie is that made more starkly apparent than Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), about a corrupt, hedonistic, drug-addicted, gambling-indebted, intentionally nameless New York cop (Harvey Keitel) investigating the rape of a nun in the vain hope it will somehow redeem his pervasive rottenness.

And it wasn’t merely that new stories were being told; this is Hollywood, after all, so we have some remakes in the mix.  Classic crime thrillers were given contemporary makeovers, like Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), as well as Barbet Schroeder’s Kiss of Death (1995), which is mostly remembered, to the extent it’s remembered at all, as the beginning and end of David Caruso’s would-be movie career, but which is much better than its reputation, thanks in no small part to a sharp script by Richard Price (Clockers), full of memorably colorful Queens characters and his signature street-smart dialogue.

Creative experimentation was in full swing, too, as neo-noir films incorporated conventions of other genres, including erotic thriller (Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct [1992]), black comedy (the Coen brothers’ Fargo [1996] and The Big Lebowski [1998]), period throwback (Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress [1995]; Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential [1997]), neo-Western (James Mangold’s Cop Land [1997]), and, well, total coffee-cup-shattering, head-in-a-box mindfuckery (Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects; David Fincher’s Seven [both 1995]).

Christ, at that point, Quentin Tarantino practically became a subgenre unto himself after the one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), which in turn inspired an incessant succession of self-consciously “clever” knockoffs like John Herzfeld’s 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Gary Fleder’s Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995).  By the mid-’90s, the crime rate, at least at the cinema, sure seemed like it had risen by 400%.

Tim Roth lies bleeding as Harvey Keitel comes to his aid in a scene from the film “Reservoir Dogs,” 1992 (photo by Miramax/Getty Images)

As different as they all are, those films can almost unanimously be viewed as a repudiation of the ethos of ’80s action movies, in which there were objectively good guys, like John McClane, in conflict with objectively bad guys, like Hans Gruber, in a zero-sum battle for justice, for victory.  It was all very simple and reassuring, in keeping with the archconservative, righteous-cowboy worldview of Ronald Reagan.  And while those kinds of movies continued to find a receptive audience—look no further than the Die Hard–industrial complex, which begat Under Siege (1992) and Cliffhanger (1993) and Speed (1994), among scores of others—filmmakers were increasingly opting for multilayered antiheroes over white hats versus black hats.

Which begged the question:  Given how blurred the lines had become between good guys and bad guys in crime cinema, could you ever go back to telling an earnest, old-school cops-and-robbers story—one with an unequivocally virtuous protagonist and nefarious antagonist—that nonetheless aspired to be something more dramatically credible, more psychologically nuanced, more thematically layered than a Steven Seagal star vehicle?

Enter Michael Mann’s Heat.

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Sorting through the Clutter:  How “The Girl Before” Misrepresents Minimalism

August 29, 2022 / / 54 Comments

The Girl Before depicts minimalism as an obsessive-compulsive symptom of emotional instability, in contrast with what I can attest it to be from years of committed practice:  a versatile set of tools/techniques to promote emotional balance—that is, to attain not merely a clutter-free home, but a clutter-free head.

In the BBC One/HBO Max thriller The Girl Before, created by JP Delaney (based on his novel), brilliant-but-troubled architect Edward Monkford (David Oyelowo)—ah, “brilliant but troubled,” Hollywood’s favorite compound adjective; it’s right up there with “grounded and elevated”—is designer and owner of a postmodern, polished-concrete, minimalist home in suburban London, One Folgate Street, which he rents out, with extreme selectivity, at an affordable rate to “people who live [t]here the way he intended.”  Prospective tenants are required to submit to an uncomfortably aloof interview with Edward, whose otherwise inscrutable mien lapses into occasional expressions of condescending disapproval, and then fill out an interminable questionnaire, which includes itemizing every personal possession the candidate considers “essential.”

The rarified few who meet with Edward’s approval must consent to the 200-odd rules that come with living in the house (no pictures; no ornaments; no carpets/rugs; no books; no children; no planting in the garden), enforced through contractual onsite inspections of the premises.  Meanwhile, One Folgate Street is openly monitored 24/7 by an AI automation system that tracks movements, polices violations of maximum-occupancy restrictions, regulates usage of water and electricity, sets time limits on tooth-brushing, and preselects “mood playlists”—just for that personal touch.  All of this is a reflection of Edward’s catholic minimalist philosophy:  “When you relentlessly eradicate everything unnecessary or imperfect, it’s surprising how little is left.”

“The Girl Before,” starring David Oyelowo, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Jessica Plummer

The Girl Before—and I’ve only seen the miniseries, not read the book—intercuts between two time periods, set three years apart, dramatizing the experiences of the current tenant, Jane Cavendish (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), grief-stricken over a recent stillbirth at 39 weeks, and the home’s previous occupant, Emma Matthews (Jessica Plummer), victim of a sexual assault during a home invasion at her flat.  (Emma, we soon learn, has since died at One Folgate Street under ambiguous circumstances that may or may not have something to do with Edward…?)  Edward’s minimalist dogma appeals to both women for the “blank slate” it offers—the opportunity to quite literally shed unwanted baggage.

This being a psychological thriller, it isn’t incidental that both Jane and Emma bear not merely uncanny physical resemblance to one another, but also to Edward’s late wife, who herself died at One Folgate Street along with their child, casualties of an accident that occurred during the construction of the home originally intended for the site before Edward scrapped those plans and went psychoneurotically minimalistic.  Everyone in The Girl Before is traumatized, and it is the imposition of or submission to minimalist living that provides an unhealthy coping mechanism for Edward, Jane, and Emma, each in their own way:

In this novel, [Delaney] wanted to explore the “weird and deeply obsessive” psychology of minimalism, evident in the fad for [Marie] Kondo and her KonMari system of organizing.  “On the face of it,” he wrote, “the KonMari trend is baffling—all that focus on folding and possessions.  But I think it speaks to something that runs deep in all of us:  the desire to live a more perfect, beautiful life, and the belief that a method, or a place, or even a diet, is going to help us achieve that.  I understand that impulse.  But my book is about what happens when people follow it too far.  As one of my characters says, you can tidy all you like, but you can’t run away from the mess in your own head.”

Gregory Cowles, “Behind the Best Sellers:  ‘Girl Before’ Author JP Delaney on Pseudonyms and the Limits of Marie Kondo,” New York Times, February 3, 2017

Indeed.  And if only The Girl Before had been a good-faith exploration of what minimalism, the psychology and practice of it, actually is.

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Book Review:  “Blood, Sweat & Chrome” by Kyle Buchanan

April 25, 2022 / / 20 Comments

Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome, published by William Morrow in February, chronicles the not-to-be-believed making of George Miller’s Mad Max:  Fury Road (2015) from conception to release through interviews with its cast and crew, and celebrates the inspiring creative imagination of the filmmakers, who defied the odds to create a contemporary classic—a movie as singularly visceral as it is stunningly visual.

But much like the nonstop action in the movie itself, the adulation expressed in the book never pauses to interrogate Miller and company’s moral imagination.  Let’s fix that, shall we?

I abhor nostalgia, particularly for the 1980s and ’90s, but I’ve recently found myself revisiting many of the films and television shows of the latter decade, the period during which I first knew I wanted to be a cinematic storyteller, when earnest star-driven Oscar dramas like Forrest Gump (1994) coexisted with, and even prospered alongside, paradigm-shifting indies à la Pulp Fiction (also ’94).  Those days are gone and never coming back—the institution formerly known as Hollywood is now the superhero–industrial complex—but I’ve wondered if some of those works, so immensely popular and influential then, have stood the test of time?

Yet my informal experiment has been about much more than seeing if some old favorites still hold up (and, by and large, they do); it’s about understanding why they worked in the first place—and what storytelling lessons might be learned from an era in which movies existed for their own sake, as complete narratives unto themselves rather than ephemeral extensions of some billion-dollar, corporately superintended brand.

In an entertainment landscape across which there is so much content, most of it deceptively devoid of coherence or meaning—a transmedia morass I’ve come to call the Multiverse of Madness—the secret to studying narrativity isn’t to watch more but rather less.  To consume fewer movies and TV shows, but to watch them more selectively and mindfully.  Pick a few classics and scrutinize them until you know them backwards and forwards.

In college, I spent an entire semester analyzing Citizen Kane (1941), from reading multiple drafts of its screenplay to watching it all the way through with the volume turned down just to appreciate its unconventional cinematography.  That’s how you learn how stories work:  Study one or two movies/novels per year… but study the shit out of them.  Watch less, but do it far more attentively.

Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the subject of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome”

That is, admittedly, a counterintuitive mindset in our Digital Age of automatic and accelerating behaviors, whereby post-credit scenes preemptively gin up anticipation for the next movie (often through homework assignments) before we’ve had a chance to digest the current one, and the autoplay feature of most streaming services encourages and enables mindless TV binge-watching.

But the quarantine, unwelcome though it may have been, did offer a pause button of sorts, and we are only now beginning to see some of the ways in which folks exploited the rare opportunity to slow down, to go deep, that it offered.  One such project to emerge from that period of thoughtful reflection is entertainment journalist Kyle Buchanan’s recently published nonfiction book Blood, Sweat & Chrome:  The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max:  Fury Road”:

In April 2020, as the pandemic swept the planet and the movie-release calendar fell apart, I began writing an oral history of Mad Max:  Fury Road for the New York Times.  Without any new titles to cover, why not dive deeply into a modern classic on the verge of its fifth anniversary?

Every rewatch over those five years had confirmed to me that Fury Road is one of the all-time cinematic greats, an action movie with so much going on thematically that there’d be no shortage of things to talk about.  I had also heard incredible rumors about the film’s wild making, the sort of stories that you can only tell on the record once the dust has long settled.

Kyle Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome:  The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max:  Fury Road” (New York:  William Morrow, 2022), 337

A movie two decades in the making, Fury Road, the belated follow-up to writer/director George Miller’s dystopian action-film trilogy Mad Max (1979, 1981, 1985) starring a then-unknown Mel Gibson as a wanderer in the wasteland—the Road Warrior—began its long journey to the screen as a proposed television series in 1995 when Miller won back the rights to the franchise from Warner Bros. as part of a settlement from a breach-of-contract suit he’d filed over having been fired from Contact (1997).

Eventually inspired to do another feature instead—“What if there was a Mad Max movie that was one long chase,” Miller pondered, “and the MacGuffin was human?” (ibid., 31)—the ensuing production was plagued with one near-terminal roadblock after another.  The behind-the-scenes story told in Blood, Sweat & Chrome is as thrilling, in its own way, as that of Mad Max:  Fury Road itself.

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Patriarchal Propaganda: How Hollywood Stories Give Men Delusions of Heroism

October 6, 2021 / / 24 Comments

Movies and TV shows—and this includes both your favorites and mine—mostly exist to remind us that ours is a man’s world.  Popular entertainment in general, regardless of medium or genre or even the noble intentions of the storytellers, is almost invariably patriarchal propaganda.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Since at least as far back as the adventures of Odysseus, men have used fantasy narratives to contextualize ourselves as the solitary heroic protagonist of the world around us—a world that would be appreciably better off if only our judgment weren’t questioned or our actions thwarted by those of inferior hearts and minds.  In the Book of Genesis, God creates man from the dust, gives him dominion over the Earth, then provides him with a “helper”—Eve—who proves considerably less than helpful when she defiantly feeds from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and spoils Paradise for everyone.

Such are the stories we’ve been hearing for literally thousands of years, and the reality we live in today is very much shaped by the presumption of patriarchy they propagandize.  In 1949, this way of telling stories—the Hero’s Journey—was codified by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and adopted by Hollywood as the blueprint for the blockbuster.  From our Westerns (Dances with Wolves) to our policiers (Dirty Harry) to our space operas (Star Wars) to our spy thrillers (James Bond) to our teen comedies (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) to our superhero universes (Iron Man) to our mob dramas (The Sopranos) to our sitcoms (Two and a Half Men), it’s a man’s world, baby—with the rest of you there to either support us or (foolishly) stand in our way.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with escapist entertainment.  It isn’t fantasy the genre that’s the problem, or even the Hero’s Journey story model, but rather the near-universal underlying patterns and motifs in our popular fictions that have unconsciously supported—that have surreptitiously sold us—the fantasy of patriarchal hegemony.  As such, white men in particular have been conditioned by these cultural narratives to see ourselves as the central heroic figure in the Epic of Me—even our storytellers themselves:

While accepting the award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for his work on The Queen’s Gambit, Scott Frank brushed off the “get off the stage” music not once but three times, reading a prepared speech from two full-length pages he’d shoved into his pocket and blowing past his allotted 45 seconds to speak for three minutes and 28 seconds—more than four and a half times as long as he was supposed to.

Viewers couldn’t have asked for a more perfect embodiment of white male privilege and entitlement as a visibly annoyed Frank reacted to the orchestra’s attempts to play him off by saying, “Really?  No,” and making a dismissive hand gesture.  The second time they started playing, he said, “Seriously, stop the music,” again waving his hand as if he were shooing away a fly and pressing on.  The third time, he insisted, “I’m almost done.”  Each time, when he commanded them to stop playing the music, they actually stopped the music.  Who knew it was that easy?

Bonnie Stiernberg, “Those ‘Queen’s Gambit’ Emmy Speeches Epitomized Exactly What’s Wrong With Hollywood,” InsideHook, September 20, 2021

Whether we’re aware of them or not, men have certain expectations about how the world should work:  that it should work for us.  After all, God gave us, not you, dominion over all living things and natural resources on Earth.  But when reality conflicts with those birthrights, we grow frustrated, and rather than questioning the stories we’ve been told about our place in the world, we tell more of the same self-mythologizing horseshit—to assure ourselves, and others, of our God-given entitlements, of our singular heroism.  Consider, for example, the overwhelming popularity—ten entries and counting—of the testosterone-charged Fast & Furious franchise:

These films use the concrete landscape to assert individuality and a refusal to knuckle under to authority.  With the exception of Brian and perhaps Roman, these inner-city car racers don’t want to be reintegrated into society.  They race cars to gain status and money, to impress sexy women, and to defy the police—just like [celebrated American NASCAR driver] Junior Johnson and the Dukes of Hazzard.  But, like the conformists and suburbanites they reject, they act like everything in nature exists to be consumed and exploited.

robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019

Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) famously makes his gang say grace before they eat, an utterly meaningless gesture since, unlike obeying the law, it costs him nothing to do so, yet it nonetheless speaks volumes about his patriarchal values.  He and his crew aren’t enlightened antiheroes as they believe, merely entitled gearheads who proudly and explicitly live their lives “a quarter mile at a time,” because to think beyond that would require a sense of empathy for those outside their range of awareness, as well as compel a sober consideration for the long-term consequences of their, to put it generously, socially irresponsible behaviors.

Dom appropriates Christian iconography to assert his moral authority—pure patriarchal propaganda

(And if you’re inclined to dismiss Dom’s worldview as the patently absurd pseudophilosophy of a one-dimensional action-movie street racer—nothing worth taking seriously—it’s worth remembering that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s operating motto is “Move fast and break things,” which sounds like exactly the sort of iconoclastic rallying cry you’d expect to hear Dom growl… until you realize the thing Zuckerberg might’ve broken while becoming the fifth wealthiest person in the world is democracy itself.)

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The Ted Lasso Way: An Appreciation

August 2, 2021 / / 12 Comments

The Emmy-nominated comedy series Ted Lasso doesn’t merely repudiate the knee-jerk cynicism of our culture—it’s the vaccine for the self-reinforcing cynicism of our pop culture.  In a feat of inspiring commercial and moral imagination, Jason Sudeikis has given us a new kind of hero—in an old type of story.

As a boy coming of age in the eighties and early nineties, I had no shortage of Hollywood role models.  The movies offered smartass supercops John McClane and Martin Riggs, vengeful super-soldiers John Matrix and John Rambo, and scorched-earth survivalists Snake Plissken and Mad Max, to cite a select sampling.  Sure, each action-hero archetype differed somewhat in temperament—supercops liked to crack wise as they cracked skulls, whereas the soldiers and survivalists tended to be men of few words and infinite munitions—but they were, one and all, violent badasses of the first order:  gun-totin’, go-it-alone individualists who refused to play by society’s restrictive, namby-pamby rules.

Yippee ki-yay.

The small screen supplied no shortage of hero detectives in this mode, either—Sonny Crockett, Thomas Magnum, Rick Hunter, Dennis Booker—but owed to the content restrictions of broadcast television, they mostly just palm-slammed a magazine into the butt of a chrome Beretta and flashed a charismatic GQ grin in lieu of the clever-kill-and-quick-one-liner m.o. of their cinematic counterparts.  (The A-Team sure as hell expended a lot of ammo, but their aim was so good, or possibly so terrible, the copious machine-gun fire never actually made contact with human flesh.)  The opening-credits sequences—MTV-style neon-noir music videos set to power-chord-driven instrumentals—made each show’s gleaming cityscape look like a rebel gumshoe’s paradise of gunfights, hot babes, fast cars, and big explosions.

  • “Miami Vice”
  • “Magnum, P.I.”
Sensing a motif?
  • “Hunter”
  • “Booker”

It might even be argued our TV heroes exerted appreciably greater influence on us than the movie-franchise sleuths that would often go years between sequels, because we invited the former into our home week after week, even day after day (in syndication).  And to be sure:  We looked to those guys as exemplars of how to carry ourselves.  How to dress.  How to be cool.  How to talk to the opposite sex.  How to casually disregard any and all institutional regulations that stood in the way of a given momentary impulse.  How to see ourselves as the solitary hero of a cultural narrative in which authority was inherently suspect and therefore should be proudly, garishly, and reflexively challenged at every opportunity.  The world was our playground, after all—with everyone else merely a supporting actor in the “great-man” epic of our own personal hero’s journey.

Oh, how I wish, in retrospect, we’d had a heroic role model like Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso instead.

THE LAST BOY SCOUT

The premise of Ted Lasso, which recently commenced its second season, is a can-do college-football coach from Kansas (Sudeikis) is inexplicably hired to manage an English Premier League team, despite that kind of football being an entirely different sport.  Ted, we learn, has been set up to fail by the embittered ex-wife of the club’s former owner (Hannah Waddingham), who, in a plot twist that owes no minor creative debt to David S. Ward’s baseball-comedy classic Major League—which the show tacitly acknowledges when Ted uncharacteristically invokes a key line of profane dialogue from the movie verbatim—inherited the team in a divorce and is now surreptitiously revenge-plotting its implosion.

Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso

But, boy oh boy, has Waddingham’s Rebecca Welton—a refreshingly dimensional and sympathetic character in her own right, it’s worth noting—seriously underestimated her handpicked patsy.  With his folksy enthusiasm and full Tom Selleck ’stache, Coach Ted Lasso unironically exemplifies big-heartedness, open-mindedness, kindness, courtesy, chivalry, civility, forgiveness, wisdom, teamwork, cultural sensitivity, and prosocial values—all with good humor, to boot.  His infectious optimism eventually converts even the most jaded characters on the show into true believers, and his innate goodness inspires everyone in his orbit—often despite themselves—to be a better person.  And if, like me, you watch the first season waiting for the show to at some point subject Ted’s heart-on-his-sleeve earnestness to postmodern mockery or ridicule—“spoiler alert”—it doesn’t.

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Too Much Perspective: On Writing with Moral Imagination

June 7, 2021 / / 18 Comments

Practicing morally imaginative storytelling means scrutinizing the values and messages encrypted in the fiction we produce—but it does not mean passing a “purity test.”

In Marty Di Bergi’s 1984 rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the titular British heavy-metal band, faced with ebbing popularity and flagging album sales, embarks on a disaster-prone tour of North America in support of its latest release, the critically savaged Smell the Glove.  During a stopover at Graceland to pay their respects to the King of Rock and Roll at his gravesite, lead vocalist David St. Hubbins comments, “Well, this is thoroughly depressing.”

To which bandmate and childhood best friend Nigel Tufnel responds, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”

“Too much.  There’s too much fucking perspective now.”

It’s a sentiment to which we can all relate, collectively endowed as we’ve become with a migrainous case of “2020 vision.”  At the start of the pandemic, long before we had any sense of what we were in for let alone any perspective on it, I like many essayists felt the urge or need or even the responsibility to say something about it, despite knowing I had no useful or meaningful insight.  I netted out with an acknowledgment that the months to come would present a rare Digital Age opportunity for quiet introspection and reflection—one in which we might expand our moral imagination of what’s possible, to invoke the exquisite wisdom of my mentor Al Gore, and perhaps envision a world on the other side appreciably more just, equitable, and sustainable than the one we had before the global shutdown.

Did we ever.  Here in the United States, we are now wrestling with issues of economic inequality, structural racism, police brutality, environmental justice, and fair access to affordable housing and healthcare with an awareness and an urgency not seen in generations, and President Joe Biden—responding to the social movements of his times like FDR and LBJ before him—has proposed a host of progressive legislation that matches the visionary, transformative ambition of the New Deal and the Great Society.

Reuters via the New York Times

With heartening moral imagination (certainly more than this democratic eco-socialist expected from him), Biden is attempting to turn the page on the Randian, neoliberal narrative of the past forty years and write a new chapter in the American story—one founded on an ethos of sympathetic coexistence, not extractive exploitation.  With our continued grassroots support and, when necessary, pressure, he might even be the unlikely hero to pull it off, too—our Nixon in China.

As for me?  I spent most of the pandemic thinking about narrativity myself.  Doing nothing, after all, was a privilege of the privileged, with whom I am obliged to be counted.  So, I used the time in self-quarantine to think and to write about the stories we tell, and I arrived at the resolute conclusion that we—the storytellers—need to do a lot better.

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Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer: On Letting Go of a Fan Favorite—and Why We Should

March 15, 2021 / / 40 Comments

Last month, actress Charisma Carpenter publicly confirmed a longstanding open secret in Hollywood:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator and Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon is an irredeemable asshole.

For years, fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which aired on the WB and UPN from 1997 to 2003, have had to reconcile their adoration for a show about a teenage girl who slays monsters with the criticism that often swirled around her creator.

Mr. Whedon’s early reputation as a feminist storyteller was tarnished after his ex-wife, the producer Kai Cole, accused him of cheating on her and lying about it.  The actress Charisma Carpenter, a star of the “Buffy” spinoff “Angel,” hinted at a fan convention in 2009 that Mr. Whedon was not happy when she became pregnant.

In July, Ray Fisher, an actor who starred in Mr. Whedon’s 2017 film “Justice League,” accused him of “gross” and “abusive” treatment of the cast and crew. . . .

On Wednesday, Ms. Carpenter released a statement in support of Mr. Fisher, in which she said Mr. Whedon harassed her while she was pregnant and fired her after she gave birth in 2003. . . .

Over the past week, many of the actors who starred on “Buffy,” including Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers, have expressed solidarity with Ms. Carpenter and distanced themselves from Mr. Whedon.  The actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, alleged on Instagram on Thursday that Mr. Whedon was not allowed to be alone with her.

“I would like to validate what the women of ‘Buffy’ are saying and support them in telling their story,” Marti Noxon, one of the show’s producers and longtime writers, said on Twitter.  Jose Molina, a writer who worked on Mr. Whedon’s show “Firefly,” called him “casually cruel.”

Maria Cramer, “For ‘Buffy’ Fans, Another Reckoning With the Show’s Creator,” New York Times, February 15, 2021

If the copious fan-issued blog posts and video essays on this damning series of insider testimonials is an accurate barometer, Millennials have been particularly crestfallen over Whedon’s fall from grace.  It’s only over the last few years, really, I’ve come to truly appreciate just how proprietary they feel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  That surprises me still, because I tend to think of Buffy as a Gen X artifact; after all, the modestly successful if long-derided (by even screenwriter Whedon himself) feature film was released five years before its TV sequel.  (If you don’t remember—and I’ll bet you don’t—the movie’s shockingly impressive cast includes no less than pre-stardom Xers Hilary Swank and Ben Affleck.)  I recall seeing this one-sheet on a subway platform during the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school—

Fran Rubel Kuzui’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992)

—and thinking somebody had finally made a spiritual sequel to my formative influence:  Joel Schumacher’s Gen X cult classic The Lost Boys.  (Turned out, however, I was gonna have to do that myself.)  I was sold!  I marvel still at how the advertisement’s economical imagery conveys the movie’s entire premise and tone.  So, yes—I was the one who went to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer in theaters.  Guilty as charged.

But it was the TV series, I’ll concede, that took Buffy from creative misfire to cultural phenomenon, so it stands to reason it made such an indelible impression on Millennials.  I submit that more than any content creator of his cohort—more so than even celebrated pop-referential screenwriters Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Williamson—Whedon is preeminently responsible for the mainstreaming of geek culture at the dawn of the Digital Age.

Buffy not only coincided with the coming out of geeks from the dusty recesses of specialty shops, it helped facilitate that very cultural shift:  As John Hughes had done for Gen X a decade earlier, Whedon spoke directly to the socially and emotionally precarious experience of adolescent misfits, and his comic-book-informed sensibilities (before such influences were cool) endowed the Buffy series with a rich, sprawling mythology—and star-crossed romance (beautiful though it is, Christophe Beck’s Buffy/Angel love theme, “Close Your Eyes,” could hardly be described as optimistic)—over which fans could scrupulously obsess.

What’s more, all three cult serials Whedon sired were alienated underdogs in their own right:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a reboot of a campy B-movie on a fledgling, tween-centric “netlet” that no one took seriously; Angel, a second-class spinoff that was perennially on the brink of cancelation (and ultimately ended on an unresolved cliffhanger); and Firefly, his ambitious Star Wars–esque space opera that lasted exactly three months—or less than the average lifespan of an actual firefly.  That these shows struggled for mainstream respect/popular acceptance only burnished Whedon’s credentials as the bard of geek-outsider angst…

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What Comes Next: Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from “Hamilton”

August 18, 2020 / / 8 Comments

Less than three months out from arguably the most important presidential election in living memory, our democracy is in deep, deep shit.

Need we recap?  Commuting Roger Stone.  Gassing Lafayette Square.  Suppressing the vote.  Sabotaging the Postal Service.  Floating the postponement—and actively undermining the credibility—of the November election.  Sending federal agents to detain (read:  abduct) protestors in Portland.  And that’s just a topline best-of-Trump-2020 compilation.

This is America?

Let’s face it:  The spirit of nihilism that animates MAGA was never about making America great again so much as it was burning the Republic to the ground.  That’s what Trump’s supporters really voted for in 2016, and it’s the one big (if never quite explicit) campaign promise he might actually deliver on:  reifying the very American carnage he once claimed exclusive qualification to redress.  To wit:  The nightly news plays like an apocalyptic bookend to the rousing founding-of-America story told in Hamilton.

Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton”

While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary masterpiece certainly challenges us to appreciate anew the value and purpose of democracy—a timely reminder if ever there was one—it somewhat less conspicuously does the same for an equally imperiled institution:  narrative itself.

Hamilton has been described by its creator as “a story about America then, told by America now” (Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2015).  But if the musical’s creative approach to its subject matter is unorthodox, its narrative structure is very much a conventional hero’s journey.  (For my Save the Cat! scholars, it’s a “Real-Life Superhero” tale, and not, as some “experts” would have you believe, Golden Fleece.)  The power in and of narrative is a central preoccupation of Hamilton; the show literally opens with a dramatic question posed to the audience:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

Alexander Hamilton is a man who imagines—who writes—his way out of poverty, and, in turn, “rewrote the game,” by “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom”—meaning, the institutionalized “divine right of kings” narrative.

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