Neo-noir: Impulse

Impulse is one lousy film but it is one of a very few films to try presenting a woman's sex drive getting her into trouble as we find men doing in neo noir. For that reason it's worth a bit of study even though it's painful to try and watch.

It's Hollywood at its worst. Steal the concept from a previously successful film and reset it. Thus, Blue Crush was Flashdance on surfboards. The concept behind Impulse was "Let's do something like Fatal Attraction only reverse the sexes of the two principals."

If you didn't see Fatal Attraction, you're not missing much, but here is the gist of it. A man married to a very sexy woman bizarrely has a one-night stand with another, less attractive but wilder, woman who turns out to be an obsessed stalker who nearly ruins his entire life.

Here is the essential point though: the troubles and the drama for Michael Douglas's character in Fatal Attraction all take place after he cheats. That calls for an interesting moral response from the audience. We have remain sympathetic to him even though he cheats on his wife. The film would fail utterly if we saw him as largely deserving his fate. It's not just that we sympathize; we want him to get away with it.

This isn't an unusual or difficult thing to bring off in a movie. There are dozens of films in which our sympathy is with men who are married to a loving and caring woman and cheat on her and yet retain our sympathy. We will feel that what he has done is wrong but we don't want him to get caught. If he does get caught we will root for him as he attempts to regain his wife's love. But how many films can you think of in which a woman cheats on her faithful and loving husband and yet the audience's sympathy remains with her?

Keep that in mind as I tell you about the set up for Impulse:

• A woman loves her husband deeply but feels something is missing from their sex life.
• She becomes aware that something is missing not because she wants sex but because she wants a baby and their efforts to get pregnant are hampered by his lack of interest in sex.
• She suggests that they try a little role playing in which they each assume romantic sounding names.
• He initially fails to respond and then tries clumsily to do so.

Got that? So here is what happens next. She goes on a business trip and while she is sitting in the hotel bar she sees her husband walk in dressed as if in character to role play. She walks up to him and tells him she wants him. They go up to her room and have wild fantasy sex. And then, as he leaves, she tells him where and when her next business trip is.

Things are looking good right? What possibly could go wrong?

Well, it turns out that the man in the bar was not her husband but his absolute doppelganger  and that he will also turn out to be an obsessed stalker. This is, of course, utterly implausible. It couldn't happen. Even if he were physically identical, husbands and wives have so many shared secrets that she would unfailingly spot that he wasn't her husband in minutes if not seconds.

But why do it that way? Why not just have her simply cheat on her husband and come to regret it? Well, we can see the answer to that if we imagine, hypothetically, that a wife could be fooled in this way. If that could and did happen, then she wouldn't really have cheated. A woman in such a a position has simply made a mistake. She thought she was having sex with her husband.

The point being that we simply do not treat men and women the same when making moral judgments. A man who has an affair is in the wrong can still a be sympathetic character. A woman who does the same will not win our sympathy. It shouldn't be that way but it is.

And that tells you a lot about why there has not been a truly great neo noir with a woman in the lead role. The public simply isn't ready for such a thing yet.

Neo Noir: Mulholland Drive

There are, as I've been going on about, two recurring themes you can't help but notice if you watch a lot of neo noir:

1. A dream-like and nostalgic atmosphere that enhances our sense of the protagonist's attempt to regain something "lost" they feel they were entitled to.
2. The protagonist's pursuit of a dream-like femme fatale as an outward symbol of their inward compulsion to get the something "lost" they feel they were entitled to.

But suppose you took the "dream-like" quality of the film and replaced it with actual dream sequences? What would you have then? The answer is, you'd have a David Lynch movie and the movie in question is called Mulholland Drive.

Watching a David Lynch movie is a lot like drinking Chartreuse, people either like it or hate it. You'll note, I don't say they either "love it or hate it" but "like it or hate it". I am in the like category. I get Lynch enough to like him.WARNING: the spoilers start here.

Anyway, the key scene in this movie is a dream sequence within a dream sequence. Yes, you read that correctly. The movie opens with a dream sequence only we don't know it's a dream sequence. We think it's real and then there is this dream sequence where two women get up in the middle of the night and catch a cab to a theatre where the MC tells us, speaking at times in in Spanish, at times in in French and at times in in English tells us that there is no band, that it it is all an illusion. Everything up until now has been a dream. Which is most emphatically not to say that everything from now on is real.

Lynch has given us at least one hint that this is the case at the start of the movie. The very opening shot is a weird nostalgic shot of a bunch of people jitterbugging. When, where, why and how is never adequately explained. Immediately after this, we see a bed and the camera pans down towards in a way that unmistakeably suggests someone's head coming down on the pillow. And the very next shot we see is the street sign for Mulholland Drive. We're in a dream.

That we come out of a dream through a dream within the dream is either going to strike you as fun and clever or it's going to strike you as not only ludicrous but irritatingly pretentious. It happens, by the way, one hour and forty-five minutes into a roughly two hour and twenty-five minute film and that launches a little game whereby you the viewer have exactly forty minutes to figure out what really happened and what was our protagonist's dream. This prospect will either strike you as fun and clever or it's going to strike you as not only ludicrous but irritatingly pretentious.

At the theatre, the protagonist finds a blue key in her purse that is obviously key to a  mysterious blue box that came up earlier. Opening this blue box seems to make the dream end.

The rough outlines are easy enough to figure out. A young woman came to Hollywood hoping to make it big and she fell in love with another young woman who has now left her.  In response she has a multi-layered dream. The layers, in order of appearance are:

• A woman about to be murdered on Mulholland Drive is saved by a horrific car crash that kills those who intended to kill her but leaves her in a state of amnesia.
• A Winkie's on Sunset Boulevard where a guy goes to confront his nightmare hoping to overcome it but is instead overcome by his nightmare.
• A young woman named Betty from Deep River, Ontario arrives in Los Angeles planning to make it and stays in her Aunt's apartment while her Aunt is away.
• A movie maker casting a movie is threatened by mob-like figures who want him to pick a woman named Camilla Rhodes for the lead role.
• A strange hired killer/pimp in a leather jacket for whom everything goes wrong.
• A weird figure called "the cowboy" who like the mob-like characters, seemed to be secretly driving the plot of the dream only  he seems to have this power solely as a teller of a narrative and not through violence.

The various dreams all overlap to greater or lesser degrees. The largest overlap is between the woman with amnesia and the woman from Deep River. They end up together trying to figure out who the first woman really is. They also end up as lovers. Except that she is just a dream. (Again, the layers of unreality will either strike you ....)

I think that deciding what is real here is less important than seeing that there is a familiar Hollywood motif at work here. We have a character investigating a mystery that seems to have nothing to do with them only to find out something evil about themselves in the process.  That, it seems to me, is the real take-away point in the movie. The dreams are a way of confronting heartbreak and we start off entirely focused on the one who broke our heart only to discover through this dream analysis that we ourselves are culpable of ... something. And the woman protagonist here symbolizes the whole city of Los Angeles.

A brief digression, if "the cowboy" sounds familiar, he ought to. We find a similar character in The Big Lebowski made just three years before this movie. We also have a strange, wheelchair confined man in a big house who seems to be the one running the shadowy mob operations. I don't think that similarity is a coincidence but is rather an homage. On that subject, the obvious question about Lynch is the same one I once asked about the Coen Brothers: He can do surreal and postmodern but could he, if required, tell a  straight story?

Part deux
Anyway, the dream within a dream sequence ends with a woman singing the song "Crying" in Spanish, a powerful hint that the movie is really about our protagonist dealing with heartbreak. But what parts of the last forty minutes of the movie are really real? That's where it gets tricky.

But I think the what is real question is just a distraction from what really matters. What is more important is that all the elements from the overlapping dreams from the first part reapear in the following order:

• The cowboy shows up in a seedy apartment and tells a girl we thought dead on a bed to wake up. Again, his ability to "narrate" the story we are watching seems to give him power in this dream.
• She gets up and we are, briefly, in "the real". We see that she is the same protagonist we have known as Betty until now is actually one and the same with a mysterious figure we have known as Diane. A woman from a few doors down shows up. Diane has switched apartments with this other woman for reasons that remain mysterious. This other woman wants the last of her stuff to move to her new place. This moment seems real but we quickly see (or should see as most people seem to miss this point)  that what is real or not doesn't matter because our heroine is herself inacapable of making clear distinctions between reality and dreams. 
• At this point our movie director shows up again only he isn't choosing between two women for his movie lead but rather is choosing Camilla Rhodes, who has now merged with the the dream girl with amesia from part one to become one character where there used to be two, as his wife thereby dealing our protagonist a blow for she is also in love with Camilla.
• Diane gets a call from "Camilla" who tells here their is a limo to take her to a place on Mulholland Drive which sets up a scene that recalls the dream where the woman who was to be murdered is saved by the car accident. This new scene even features some of the same dialogue from the first. The difference is that what happens in this dream is that Diane goes to the party and his humilated by her lack opf success as compared to Camila and her loss of Camilla to the director as he seems to be about to announce their marriage only he never quite says it because we are wrenched out of that dream into
• The Winkie's where Diane is talking to a hit man so she can take out a contract on Camilla. The hit man tells Diane that she will receive a blue key as a sign that the job is done. It's not the same blue key as the first one. And when she asks what it opens we are wrenched out of this scene and ...
• Back to the apartment where Diane haunted by her dreams .... I think I'll leave that spoiler unspoiled. Suffice to say, the movie is now over.

Okay, you still want to know what is real? You can push your own interpretaion, but here is what I think is real.

• Diane is real. She may or may not come from Deep River for reasons I'll come to in a special bonus Canadian section below. 
• She came to LA, young and innocent and hoping to make it. 
• She switches apartments with another woman because she is hiding from "the two detectives" who are actually her pimps. She is trying to stop being a prostitute.
• She has spent the last few days hiding in her apartment, perhaps stoned. Faced with the failure of her hopes, she slowly lose her grip on reality leading to the thing I won't spoil.
• Camilla/Rita is unreal. The name Camilla obviously recalls the La Dame aux Camelias and she represents the life as as hooker that she is struggling to prevent herself from falling back into. 
• I'm not sure the hit that Diane seems to contract for at Winkie's is real. First of all because I don't think Camilla is real and second because of the sense we got in the first part that Winkie's is where people go to confront their nightmares. 

 Two magnificent moments
 I find all Lynch's movies flawed but they have some wonderful moments. I may be partly biased in his favour because the greatest erotic adventure in my life began when I went to see his Wild at Heart with a certain someone.

In any case, the first great moment here involves a part that "Betty" tries out for in a Soap Opera. It involves a girl who is being pursued sexually by a friend of her parents. We see her do her lines twice. Once while practicing with Camilla and then again when she tries out for the part. In the two scenes, the exact same words are used to achieve completely different effects. In the first our protagonist plays the part of a sexual victim and in the second she is the sexual aggressor.

A brief digression, one of the great things about Lynch is his willingness to be trashy. There is a lovely moment in the audition where a bad guy trying to exploit the young girl sexually turns out to be named "Woody" an obvious slap in the face (if not a kick in the testicles) to Woody Allen.

The second is a beautifully cheesy moment. Our protagonist, now known to us as Diane, is on the couch and we think she is crying as she thinks of her loss of Camilla. The camera pans down and we see, to our shock, that she is actually masturbating. What we took to be tears of bereavement was actually her frustration at being unable to reach orgasm. The phone rings and we are wrenched out of that scene and ...

Into a conversation with Camilla who tells Diane that there is a car waiting for. But there is also a wonderfully trashy moment here. Camilla says, "Are you okay? You coming?" And yes, the joke is intentional. It plays on that old seventies classic that sounds of distress and sounds of sexual excitement are very similar.

But again, there is a deeper point here. Lynch has gone a good way to solving the problem of how to use a woman's sexuality in a neo noir. As I've said before, with male leads, his sexual desires are symbolic of his desire to regain what he has lost. That is not plausible with female leads but this ambiguity between pain and pleasure, that is something worth exploring further someday and somewhere.

Special bonus Canadian section
When Betty says she is from Deep River, do you think innocent girl from small hick town somewhere in Canada?  Well, that's a problem. You see, Deep River is not your ordinary small town. The primary industry in Deep River is a nearby nuclear research facility. Deep River probably has a higher number of PhDs per capita than 99.999 percent of the towns on earth. It's not a place where naive, unsophisticated girls come from.

The big question is, "Whose mistake is this?" Did Lynch make the mistake or did Diane make it when she created Betty?



Only one person in the entire world will understand the significance of this video here:

Neo noir Thursday: Swimming Pool

One thing I have insisted upon when discussing neo noir is the maleness of the genre. Ned Racine is male and could only be male and the many attempts to imitate Body Heat since it first appeared in 1981 have tended to focus on males as well. The major new component in neo noir has been explicit use of erotic elements and these have been very effective in drawing out aspects of the modern male predicament.

But could you do it the other way? Could you use erotic elements to draw out aspects of the modern female predicament? Before we answer that, we should also ask whether you'd want to. Using sexuality to expose male weakness is a natural but, in the west at least, we have tended to deny that women collectively show any moral weakness in their response to sex. And we are, if anything, even more reluctant to go there since feminism.

You can't simply reverse the genders in any of these movies. A typical male neo noir hero, as I have discussed before, tends to want to make up for the past and feels entitled to "make it". Oftentimes this is shown by his obsessive pursuit of the femme fatale. You could not credibly reverse that.

It's not that some women don't do stupid things in the pursuit of sex. When I was at university there was a woman who got obsessed about the idea of having group sex with members of the university's water polo team and made a major fool of herself over it. But no one would think her story made any general point about the moral challenges of being a woman. She is just too individual and would immediately be taken as an exceptional case. A character like Ned Racine is not like most men but lots of us can easily imagine how we might end up like him if they let certain natural traits have their head.

Francois Ozon, a French film director—a male French film director—and  Charlotte Rampling are the only people I can think of who have made a truly convincing neo noir with a female lead.

Like other neo noir, the set up is familiar to the point that it risks cliché. An English woman goes to the south of France to work on a mystery novel and runs into a French girl and their attitudes clash. When the English woman,  Sarah, says she loathes swimming pools, the French girl, Julie, says, "Yeah, I know what you mean. I prefer the sea too. The ocean. The crushing waves. The feeling of danger that you could be swimming and at at any second be swept away. Pools are boring. There is no excitement, no feeling of infinity, it's just a big bathtub." Sarah replies, "It's more like a cesspool of living bacteria."

This is not unfamiliar territory: for one woman the pool is too safe, for the other it is too dangerous. The actress playing Julie dresses like trash, when she dresses at all and she just might spend more time topless in this movie than she spends fully dressed.

And Sarah dresses much the way an uptight woman "with a broomstick up her butt" as Julie describes her, might.

We see her here mixing artificial sweetener with yoghurt.

She chokes this crap down even though she obviously hates it. When she is offered an aperitif, she takes tea. You know the drill.

Julie, on the other hand, eats very well.

Our first hint that something out of the usual might be about to happen comes from Sarah. She is offered the chance to stay at her publisher's house in France but from the second she arrives she acts a little off. She behaves more like a teenage babysitter voyeuristically looking through the stuff in the house.

And then Julie acts a little too wild, a little too self destructive, a little too much like a character that someone might make up rather than an actual teenage girl. And there is a major porn film vibe about it as the guys she picks as lovers are incongruous just as male porn stars tend to be. As soon as you see them, you think, "She could do better than this.

I don't think that is accidental. Here is the most significant of the male figures:

The photo below is the infamous porn start John Holmes. Tell me if you think the resemblance of the actor above to John Holmes is a coincidence? Or do you think he was picked for the role precisely because of that resemblance?

I won't say anymore because I wouldn't want to spoil this magnificent film for anyone.

One thing you really want to watch for, however, are repeated visual motifs. For example, one of the things that clearly makes Sarah antsy about France is its Catholic heritage. When she finds a cross on the wall of her bedroom, she must peel it off and put it in a drawer.

When Julie shows up a short while later, one of her first actions is to peel the solar cover off the pool that so disgusts Sarah and go skinny dipping. We, seeing it from Sarah's perspective, see Julie coming swimming out from under the cover and do this:

That is only one of a number of recurring evocations of the crucifixion in this movie. Contrary to what is usually the case in artsy movies, there is actually a point to it as there is a death and resurrection theme but who, how and where is something I can't tell you about without spoiling the movie for you.

What is worth talking about a little, I think, is the relationship between the two women. As I said at the top, no one would ever believe a tale about a woman in pursuit of a particular lover says anything about the moral predicament of being a  woman the same way that the obsessive pursuit of a particular sort of woman definitely does say something about the moral predicament of being a man. But a woman contemplating a younger, wilder self she might have been does, I think, say something about the larger moral issues of being a woman. Who a woman is and how she became that woman and what she gave up along the way and did she give it up because that was the right choice, the prudent choice, or did she give it up because she was chicken—par délicatesse, j'ai perdu ma vie—is very much to the point.

We get the camera flanneur for full twenty minutes in this movie. Stuff just happens without any seeming story line. And our heroine gets on board the TGV and rides to the south of France. And there she is in the Luberon with the winds coming through and the pine trees and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle. This is familiar territory and familiar territory for the English experience of France thanks to Peter Mayles.

Imagine it's you suddenly cut loose from all your social ties in this far away but familiar exotica. What would you do? What would you fantasize about? More to the point, think of a woman you know and love, aren't you curious about what she might fantasize about or even do in such a  situation? And don't you think she herself might wonder what she might be capable of in such a situation?

Neo noir Thursday: Dusters

There is a lot of overlap between film noir and neo noir and other genres. A big part of the reason that the list of supposed noir at Wikipedia is so ridiculously long is that just about any action film, crime film or suspense film with dark overtones gets labelled noir.

But what about westerns? The thing about them is that the genre is so easy to identify as what it is that we  never have to wonder is this a western or is it something else. We do the opposite sometimes; we wonder, for example, whether the first Star Wars movie isn't really a disguised western becauser it isn't very credible as science fiction.

Anyway, The Man of the West is a western with a very noirish feel about it. Look at the opening credit above and you can see Gary Cooper! appearing very pointedly in a back hat. Just read the teaser at IMDb and you can feel it:

A reformed outlaw becomes stranded after an aborted train robbery with two other passengers and is forced to rejoin his old outlaw band. 

All the elements I have been discussing are there.

We have a man with a past who drifts into town. He is mysterious. He is carrying a lot of money. He lies. He gives different people different names and different hometowns when they ask where he is from. He is seeking a new life.

There is a moll, played by the very yummy Julie London and they get as much of her magnificent breasts as was allowable in 1958 on the screen for us to see. There is also an threat of sexual assault that runs through the movie. Gary and Julie also sleep together every single night but the movie never so much as lets us wonder what might or might not happen. They bond but we don't know if sex is adding its hardening and lubricating qualities to the union.

And that is a limitation. The temptation is to say they always handled sex better "back then" when the code forced film makers to imply rather than portray. Well, not always and neo noir is, I think a good example. An updated version of this story, with more explicit sex, could well be not just a better movie but a much better movie.

The moral aspects of the story are also right. There is a complication that upsets our protagonist and forces him into a situation where his past may lead him to fail in the way he has failed before. There is a distinct lack of moral clarity. The decision between right and wrong is never clear to us our to our protagonist.

There is conscious nostalgia. A way of life that is just disappearing is shown. One nice touch is when our protagonist flinches and cowers when the train comes in the station. He has never seen one before.

Related to that nostalgia,  there is a fabulous plot twist, a "something" about the old life and those who lead it that gets revealed very powerfully part way through.

In the end, though, it's Gary Cooper and it ends the way a Gary Cooper movie has to end and that isn't noir; although there is a certain vagueness about it that you could just imagine events after the closing credits that aren't quite 100 percent Gary Cooper if you wanted to do so.

Mythic reality
The primary reason it can't be noir—and the primary reason no western could—is that the story told here is mythic. We often think of a myth as a story that isn't true and it can even be pejorative to call something "a myth". But it is more accurate to say that a myth is a story where truth conditions don't apply.

It's easy to grasp if you think of its opposite. Testimony in court is a kind of story where truth conditions are paramount. If I say I saw the accused at the mall and it is later shown that that was impossible, my story is now worthless (except perhaps to prove perjury against me).

But there are other stories that aren't like that. If Mary tells an erotic fantasy to her husband to get him excited, for example, it is, paradoxically important that it feel like it could be true and equally important that it not be true.

Myths are something like that. It is important that they feel like they could be true but it is not particularly important that we check the facts. For a simple example of this, look at the opening picture at the top of this post. That is familiar western scenery and most of us might imagine that the old west looked like that. It didn't. By the time westerns were filmed, the frontier was long gone. The only open spaces big enough to give the feeling of the frontier were badlands and deserts. And so that is the image that goes with the west. We see cattle drives across country where cattle couldn't survive in real life.

Look at this still for example. It comes in the middle of a fantastic scene shot in a claustrophobic interior. The old outlaw appears, reveals the protagonist's murky past, walks out of the scene and towards the camera and then proceeds to deliver a soliloquy about the old, legendary life he and the protagonist led. It's very much like noir. There are similar encounters in Key Largo and we could imagine this guy as Edward G Robinson's character Rico and Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart's character soldier. But no noir could handle the scene in this way. It would all break down if we asked ourselves where exactly this guy is supposed to be standing. He has walked through the fourth wall; he couldn't have walked as far from the other guys as he has and still be in the cabin anymore.

I'll have more on this tomorrow. For now, suffice to say that new noir can't do anything like. It has to seem real.

Near neo noir Thursday: Obsession

[Spoilers galore so don't read any further if you are planning on watching this turkey.]

Short version, don't waste your time. But some failures are interesting in that they point the way to future success.

It's a Brian de Palma movie so you know what you are going to get. A whole lot of Hitchcock devices combined with utterly unbelievable character motivations. The thing is based on a "story" by de Palma and Paul Schrader except that it's really story lifted right out of Hitchcock's Vertigo.

It's on the way-too-long, way-to-inclusive list of supposed Film Noir up at Wikipedia. I think every dark-mood movie ever made is on that list.

So what has it got going for it? Not much.

But it does highlight one element of neo noir that is worth noting and that is the protagonist's being driven by some past failure to do the morally right thing that is required of him as a man. This element was more hinted at more than used or drawn out in Chinatown and it is beautifuly used in Body Heat. Even Palmetto uses it fairly well. Here in Obsession it is overdone to the point of ridiculousness.

If you know the plot of Vertigo, then you know this one too. A man is haunted by the memory of his wife's death, an event he holds himself responsible for. He meets a woman who looks exactly like her and becomes obsessed at the thought of having a retake of his old love. In Hitchcock, the man fails because he hasn't changed. He has the same weaknesses and failings so, when he comes up against a similar situation, he makes the same mistake leading to the same tragic end.

But de Palma and Schrader change a key element. Unbeknownst to our protagonist, the whole thing is actually a  set up. He only thinks it is his failings that caused his wife's death when it is actually the plotting and machinations of a person he thinks of as a friend that cause her death. And then they stick a happy ending on it. It's sort of like sitting down to watch a movie about the Titanic only someone has replaced the last five pages of the script with the ending from one of the weaker episodes of Fantasy Island.

Controversy that isn't sexy
Oddly missing from the plot is any sexual element at all. We have a man who falls deeply in love with two women and both relationships are so chaste they make Emma and Mr. Knightly look like hard-core porn by comparison. This in a movie by two guys, Brian de Palma and Paul Schrader, who specialize in creepy sexual relationships. What happened? Oddly enough, the reason the movie is so unerotic is that they went too far.

Huh? Well, consider this oddly uninformative line from the Wikipedia article on the movie:

Completed in 1975, Columbia Pictures picked up the distribution rights but demanded that minor changes be made to reduce potentially controversial aspects of the plot.

And all five people who read the article said, "What potentially controversial elements?" And you can read far and wide and find no explanation. Apparently it's so "controversial" that no one wants to talk about it even now.

I don't know for certain myself but I'll make a pretty confident guess [here comes the big spoiler]. The woman who looks exactly like the dead wife that the protagionist becomes obsessed with isn't just any woman. For while it appears that his daughter also died in the accident that killed his wife, she actually survived. She has been spirited away to Italy by the villain bent on revenge all these years and fed a steady diet of "your father irresponsibly caused your mother's death" so now she is ready to be used as a tool in revenge.

(Which is sort of like planting an oak tree so that you can cut it down twenty-five years from now and make it into a club so you can kill someone. I mean, why not just buy a baseball bat right now?)

Okay, the "revenge" then turns out to be that an encounter is set up and the hero falls in love with the hate-filled daughter and becomes obsessed with marrying her. Again, in the Vertigo plot, the protagonist is emotionally disturbed because he has seen his wife die in front of him. It could happen so you believe it. But it could also not happen. In this plot, you have to believe that the villain knew with absolute certainty that the daughter would grow up to look like exactly her mother and that the protagonist would become obsessed with her if he ever met her and that all well-meaning attempts to help him would only drive him deeper into his obsession until ...

Anyway, the bizarre plan works because it's in the script and then our protagonist marries the woman he has become obsessed with who is actually—I suspect you are beginning to see where the controversy might arise—his daughter! It's best to resort to clinical language when dealing with such sensitive issues. For example, icky, icky, gross, gross!

So how does the movie handle it? Well, we start with our protagonist unconscious. He is dreaming of his wedding day the morning after it happened. The image is literally fuzzy. We see the vows, the cutting of the cake,  the kiss, and then we hear his wife/daughter mysteriously telling him she is going to give him another chance to prove he loves her and then, bang he is awake and she too has been kidnapped.

And what else happened on their wedding night? Did he get drunk and was unable to perform? Did she drug him? Was the incestuous sex so good it clouded his brain? Who knows. They do kiss on the lips so presumably something at least started to happen but the changes demanded by Columbia all conspire to muddy the issue as much as possible, not so we won't know, but so so we won't think about it.

All of which makes a certain sense but why not just not make the movie in the first place. It's like remaking Lolita and making Dolores twenty-five years old. Okay, the story is not offensive to anyone anymore but it also isn't the same story anymore either. "We stopped the spread of the cancer by shooting the patient in the head."

Oh yeah, just in case that isn't crazy enough, de Palma sticks a happy ending on it. An utterly conventional romantic happy ending in which the two leads run into one another's arms in defiance of the whole world and the camera spins around them and they are so in love. Okay, in the abstract—father and daughter go through serious trauma and then are reunited so they hug—all seems harmless enough. But put the specific context in and icky, icky, gross, gross!

The subtext is so elaborate they had to leave out the text
The perhaps surprising thing is that the whole movie is an intensely literary exercise. It's not just that it features extensive references to Vertigo, the movie assumes you know the plot of Vertigo because otherwise you couldn't follow what was happening. And there is a whole Dante Vita Nuovo subtext as well.

All of this is quite deliberate. I'm sure they had Nabokov in mind and were attempting to achieve a succès de scandale that could be justified on "artistic" grounds when they wrote it. And then they were forced to tone it down. But you can't blame the censors for this one. It was a confused mess before they got their hands on it.

The whole thing is so damn complex that most viewers must have left the theatre not entirely sure what had happened. Not surprisingly, this is one of those movies that critics loved and viewers hated. Critics love things that are hard to understand because it justifies the existence of critics.

The neo noir elements
The big neo-noir thing, as I say, is the hero driven by his inner demons and past failures. That is an important element in neo noir. A hero like Sam Spade has a past and demons but he is also driven by a genuine and admirable sense of justice that triumphs over his and everybody else's selfish concerns.

But that hero is harder to believe in now. The turning point in hard-boiled and, therefore, noir history comes with I, the Jury. The unintended effect of Spillane's travesty was to expose the weakness of the hard-boiled hero. How is the hard-boiled hero with his personal sense of justice any different from a psycho path? How is Batman really all that different from the Joker? Everyone felt sure the hard-boiled hero they loved was different but how do you explain the difference in an era that doesn't allow appeals to moral truth?

We tell ourselves, "But he is the hero is on the side of truth and justice!" The problem with that, however, is that his reasons for doing right are always personal and not an appeal to any principles outside himelf. Raymond Chandler, forced to face the contradictions, created the character of Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye. Marlowe says this of Lennox:

I'm not sore at you. You're just that kind of guy. For a long time I couldn't figure you out at all. You had nice ways and nice qualities, but there was something wrong. You had standards and you lived up to them, but they were personal. They had no relation to any kind of ethics or scruples. You were a nice guy because you had a nice nature. But you were justa s happy with mugs or hoodlums as with honest men. Provided the hoodlums spoke fairly good English and had fairly acceptable table manners. You're a moral defeatist. I think maybe the war did it and again I think maybe you were born that way.

"No relation to any kind of ethics or scruples". What he means is that nothing of Lennox's code can be justified by appealing to anything outside himself. And that is the way of the neo noir hero. Why does Batman fight crime? Not because crime is wrong but because he saw his parents killed in front of him when he was a kid. If he'd had a happy childhood he'd presumably be happy working as a concentration camp guard.

We all feel that the hero we like is different but we can't actually explain why he is good. In the end, the only reason Batman comes down on the side of good because his fans really want him to and the scriptwriters are careful never to disappoint them.

You could blame the writers and directors for this except that it's true of our entire culture. Why should you "walk for the cure"? The ads tell you to do it for someone you love—your mother, wife, daughter, best friend. No one makes a case for why defeating this cancer might serve some greater moral truth. Every moral appeal is an attempt to sway your emotions and not an appeal to some moral reality that could be argued about. No, do it because you care.

But what about the hero who cares deeply for reasons that are vague, or disturbed, or twisted or even crazy? How is the bad dark knight different from the good dark knight? The reason neo noir is so important to anyone wondering what it is to be a man in our era is that it forces us to consider those questions.

It's interesting to compare Chinatown  and Who Framed Roger Rabbit in that regard. Jake Gittes has a past in Chinatown and his inability to bring about justice in Chinatown, his managing to get the woman he was trying to protect killed, haunts him. The idea is there but it's latent. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, heavily based on Chinatown, you can see how much the plot motif had developed in just thirteen years. And it's all the more evident because Roger Rabbit is just a cartoon with lots of parody aspects. The demons from 'toon town haunting Eddie Valiant are much more prominent in the story than the ones from Chinatown haunting Jake Gittes.

Obsession was a step along that path. It's not a terribly well-made movie but it's part of the history.

Intentional story telling

I am preparing tomorrow's movie post and the movie I have picked is not a neo noir whereas every film I've discussed on Thursday all summer has been neo noir. It has a lot in common with them and a big commonality is the lying. The narrator of this story is so deeply embroiled in his lies that it may as well be a neo noir.

Anyway, that got me thinking about one of the points The Last Psychiatrist is so good at: intentionality in story telling. We often tell stories that, on their face, seem to make one kind of point but actually betray a completely different purpose.

And we almost always do this when we tell a story intentionally. That is the story that is told not to divert or titillate but a told with a purpose. A doctor who specialized in alcoholism gave a great example of this sort of lie and how it gets revealed once. A guy made an appointment to see him and when he sat down he told the doctor that he'd had a recent drinking experience that had really bothered him. And then he said this,

Doctor, I'm not an alcoholic. I hadn't had a drink in seventeen years before this happened.

And the doctor said, "I knew he was an alcoholic as soon as he said that. Only an alcoholic would remember exactly how long it had been since his last drink."

The alcoholic does not actually know he is an alcoholic in the same sense that he knows he owns a blue shirt. But the fascinating thing is the way the story betrays conflicting intentions. He says he isn't but he is obviously worried that he might be and is trying to deflect the narrative from the conclusion he doesn't want it to run to. That intention is right in the telling of the story and in who he chose to tell it to.

Anyway, the movie for tomorrow is A River Runs Through It, and it is that kind of story. The things Norman Maclean tries to hide are more interesting than what he reveals.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Neo noir: Wild Things
Well it is neo noir. We may as well give them that. Otherwise you get into one of those stupid arguments like whether something really is art or really is poetry. But bad? I can't begin to tell you how bad this movie is. But, you know, it's bad in a sorta good-trashy way—if you were up at two AM and you couldn't sleep and your brain was so dead that only non-challenging trash would satisfy, you'd probably watch it wall the way to the end.

There is no narration but we do get the camera flâneur ...

Actually, let me start this another way. It isn't worth the deep analysis. I picked it for the series for two reasons: I'd never seen before (whereas I had seen all the other movies in this series so far) and it is number 4 on the Box Office Mojo list of top-grossing, neo-noir films. That, as we shall see, is a little less impressive than it might initially seem.

Back in 1981, Lawrence Kasdan surprised everyone by making a hit out of a movie called Body Heat. Wild Things made $30 million in 1998 but it cost $20 million to make. Body Heat, which comes in at #7 on the Box Office Mojo list, made $24 million in 1981. In constant dollars, that is about $42 million in 1998 dollars, the year Wild Things was released. And Body Heat was made for a lot less money; it didn't have a single big name star in it. (Although it had four actors who later became big-name stars: William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Ted Danson and Mickey Rourke.)

So the things is, Hollywood, as it often does, has tried to duplicate the Body Heat phenomenon ever since. Look up erotic thrillers and you'll see literally hundreds of mediocre imitations of which Wild Things is probably the best known.

One of the cool bits of trivia about Body Heat—it must be cool 'cause everyone mentions it—is that it was supposed to be set in New Jersey but had to be moved because of a strike. I mention that because if it hadn't been moved, Miami Vice probably would have been New Jersey Vice. Why? Because Hollywood has raided Body Heat for television and movie concepts ever since the movie was made. Let me give you an example:

1. Body Heat is set in a hot and steamy Florida town.
2. There is a very rich community right beside a poorer community.
3. It features a guy who wants to make it to the top but meanwhile is lazy and spends all his time seducing a series of women. 
4. He gets involved in a murder plot with a woman that involves them taking someone for a lot of money and running away to a hot and exotic land. 
5. There is a hot steamy scene in which the camera lingers on our hero removing a woman's sexy white panties.
6. The movie makes repeated homage to Double Indemnity including, among other things, a moment which a detective says that having more people in the plot makes the crime harder to conceal. (The line is derived from one delivered by Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity.)
7. After the murder there is some double crossing as one of the plotters tries to eliminate everyone who could incriminate him or her and suddenly, no one knows who can they trust anymore.
8. It ends up with one person in a hot and exotic land with all the money.

Meanwhile, Wild Things features:
I'm not going to type the list twice: everything from 1 to 8 above is also in this movie.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I plan to swipe all or most of those elements myself someday. But it ain't enough to just put them all in the movie. There has to be some art about it and there isn't in Wild Things.

After Body Heat, Hollywood got in the habit of taking the elements from movie putting them into jar and shaking them up. Both Palmetto and this movie work like that. In typical Hollywood fashion, though, this one has been made on the theory that if one pill is good for you, the whole bottle will make you immortal. So if Ned Racine has sex with one hot woman whom he plans murder with in Body Heat, Sam Lombardo in Wild Things has sex with three hot partners (two women and one man) with whom he plans the murder. And if Body Heat has two surprise twists, well this movie has ... actually, there are so many I lost count. Far too many in any case. You stop caring long before the end.

Otherwise, they have all the elements right down to the white panties. These are worn by Denise Richards who spends a shocking amount of time in her underwear. And she does topless, which is a mistake because her breasts look real when she is wearing a bra but decidedly fake when she takes it off. She also does a scene in a bathing suit that is see through when it's wet.

That scene is at the high school pool because her character is supposed to be seventeen years old. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. You will be as relieved as I was to know she was actually 27 so that makes it alright.

I mean, it's not like they intentionally evoke Lolita or anything.

Uh oh.

They do evoke Lolita.

Oh well, at least they don't have any shots that really play up the notion of an adult male having sex with schoolgirls because that would be kinda like, what's the word, cheap exploitation of underage sex for gratuitous titillation.

They wouldn't for example, dress the underage girl up in little-girl shoes and socks.

Uh oh.

Oh well, at least they don't put one of the seventeen-year-old girls in a white shirt and pleated skirt that suggests a Catholic school uniform even though she goes to a public school that doesn't have uniforms and then have her have sex with an adult male.

Of course they do; they can't help themselves. (This film pulled this cheap exploitation trick one year before Britney Spears did it in case you are wondering. Maybe this is where her producers got the idea?)

Pedophiles must have loved this flick. If there is a way that this movie could have stooped any further, I can't think of it. It's a shockingly non-erotic experience for all that. It's no more erotic than any random episode of The OC.

The acting is television-show quality throughout. David Caruso's acting is lively and animated compared to what you see in this movie. The camera work and the art direction, however, are brilliant and I'll get to that later today with an "aesthetics of manliness" post.

Manliness lesson
Now, one of the themes I've been hitting on all these movies is that there usually is some insight into modern male sexuality embodied in neo noir. Well, there isn't much to say about this movie but I've come up with something appropriate to the film. (There is no limit to what I will do for you dear readers.)

At one point there was a shot of the two male leads in the shower together. The director cut it because the scene was "gratuitous". He did not feel the same way about several scenes in which the two female leads kiss and make out. Girl on girl action is essential to the plot, boy on boy action is gratuitous. That is our lesson for today.


An aside related to the above: I just found out that search engines that counts certain elements and if you have enough of them on your blog, and rate your blog as a "gay site". Google finds ten pages of likely posts for this site. (UPDATE January 28, 2012, I'm now up to 27 pages.) Who knew? I only know because one of my readers did the research before me and it showed up in my stats file. Someone out there, is trying to figure out if I'm gay.  Thank you; it's an honour just to be nominated.

Manly Thor's Day special

Blood Simple: the manliness lesson
"To really get a movie like this, I think you have turn around and watch the audience watching it. See yourself in the dark watching and figure out why this stuff resonates."


My thesis—which is a highfallutin way of saying the thing I keep coming back to—is that neo noir films have something to say about the challenges of being a man since 1980. And Blood Simple seems to me to be a great movie for that. Not for anything it says on purpose but for the things that just slip in.

After the narrated bit I discussed in the previous post, we get a dialogue between two people in a car. There has been a lot of commentary about the men in this movie and what their behaviour indicates. But pay attention to the woman here. Men often complain that women send mixed messages about sex but, I have often contended, a woman who sends mixed messages about sex is normal. The woman in this scene does something else. Something that is all too common today but rarely gets much criticism. As a man, you want to be able to recognize this behaviour pattern so you can get the hell out when you see it.

As I say, things go deeply wrong in this movie and lots of people have commented about the ways the male characters contribute to that going wrong. But this woman is trouble, real serious trouble. Our sense of charity tends to lead us to thing that she is just troubled but you don't want any part of her life.

Manly Thor's Day special

Neo noir: Blood Simple
(I am on vacation and the first post of the day keeps getting later and later ... )

The title from this one comes from Dashiell Hammett.

"If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood simple like the natives. I've arranged a killing or two in my time, when they were necessary. But this is the first time I've ever got the fever"

Hammett's ultimate objectives were political. He was a communist and he believed that the seeming surface order masked a deeper imbalance in human affairs. So, as much as the observation above may look like a comment on human psychology, it's really a comment about the ideology of capitalism.

Yes, I know: BORING!!!

And that is why nobody reads Hammett much anymore.

But suppose you took the politics out of it. Suppose you just had a bunch of Hammett-like characters floating along aimlessly in a world that made no sense? That is what the Coen brothers do and they tell us so in so many words at the opening of their very first movie. As Blood Simple opens we have big pan shots of Texas and, classic noir image, oil derricks accompanied by a classic noir narration. But read what the voice says:

The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Man of the Year—something can always go wrong. And go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help—watch him fly. Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else-- that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas ... and down here... you're on your own.

We don't know who is saying this and I'm going to leave it that way. Just think of those words. There is a very clear disavowal of Hammett going on here despite his having inspired the title.

Here is another way to think about all this. Suppose liberalism lost its favourite explanation. Although most liberals are not and never were Marxists, they did buy the theory of capitalism and its discontents being at the root of everything. But suppose they lost that and all they had was the art that had been built on that ideology. Then you'd get movies like the ones the Coen brothers make. Beautiful, artfully crafted movies with nothing at their core. Movies that are inspired by a deep love of movies and of movie-making but movies that show very little affection for humanity.

These are movies in which things do, as our narrator hints, go deeply, deeply wrong but without any real explanation as to why. The Coen brothers dodge this by setting movies in places like Texas and Fargo. That is to say, places sophisticated movie-goers can see as far away and foreign. For this is a movie not so much about a world gone wrong but about a world that no longer makes sense to good liberals and it's a good thing to have it all happen over there someplace.

To really get a movie like this, I think you have turn around and watch the audience watching it. See yourself in the dark watching and figure out why this stuff resonates. More to come ...

Body Heat Part 3

The convention that wasn't used
Every neo noir film tends to use the conventions of classic noir: the fedora, venetian blinds, Gothic camera angles, the femme fatale and so forth. It's telling then when a movie skips over one of the obvious choices.

Body Heat does not feature a narrator. That is quite telling because Phillip-Marlowe-style narration is used by the vast majority of neo noir films. And it is used for a very simple reason, it's the first thing you hear and therefore plays an important first impression role. That voice instantly tells you "This is noir". And there lies the problem for if the movie has to tell you what it is then maybe it isn't really.

Instead of a narrator, Kasdan uses a realist convention some times called the flâneur. A flâneur is sort of loiterer. The story teller—in this case, the camera—seems to simply record what is in front of them as they float through life and we try and assemble some sort of narrative in our heads as we follow them. I say seems to float along because the details they and therefore we see are all carefully selected by the writer to create a sense of character, place and time. Kasdan is particularly interesting in that he uses this stylistic convention of realism to deceive rather than to be realistic.

The "time" in that trio is particularly interesting because the time he seeks to create is a nostalgic time. Thus the first things we hear Ned Racine say is this

It's the Seawater Inn. My family used to eat dinner there twenty-five years ago. Now somebody's torched it to clear the lot.

And there we are. And it helps that the scene is set in a room that gives us a very indistinct notion of time. (As I've said before, it's a brilliant touch that the sense of the nostalgia is not for the specific period of the classic noir but for a past for which there was still lots of evidence at the time the film is set in.)

A moment later, Ned ruefully adds that it was probably one of his clients who torched the Seawater Inn. Character, place and time in four sentences. And in four sentences that do nothing to call attention to themselves. That's writing.

But consider how much more authoritative this would have sounded if delivered by voice over narration. We'd still have time place and character but it would be a different character with more distance on the story and therefore more authority. Even when that narrator was later revealed to be Ned it would still be stuck in our heads as something that had been narrated.

By simply giving us Ned (and what a perfect name, it sounds like the name of a guy who always wanted to be Nancy Drew's boyfriend) and loitering along with him the camera forces us to either like the guy or stop watching. You have to want to be Ned for the movie to work and you do want to be him.

His "family" is also an interesting choice. Most heroes don't have families. They don't have fathers or mothers. This one mention changes everything about this guy. He isn't going to be Mike Hammer.

The camera flaneur goes on for a full eight minutes before we start to get anything like a story when he tries to pick up Matty Walker. Everything we have seen up until that moment is stuff that happens to Ned. This is the first thing he tries to do. We know he'll fail of course because of what we have already seen. What is different is that we have effortlessly slid into a story—a very deliberately constructed story—with no sense of having done so.

By the way, in a brilliant musical choice, the orchestra plays "That Old Feeling" as he first sees Matty. Nostalgia and the woman blend into one. And away we go for a wild ride.

I've written before of the unrealistic moment. The touch where the writer goes too far as if by accident and forces us to take their side. In this movie it is a scene in the Pinehaven Tavern when Ned and Matty shake hands and he comments that her hand is hot and she says her temperature runs a couple of degrees above normal. This too is a noir convention; think of Phillip Marlowe describing a woman as a blonde to make a Bishop put his foot through a stained glass window.

But, again, it isn't narrated but acted out and our reaction is to think, "O come on". It's just too too much. But, like Charlotte Haze getting run over, if we choose to accept it and go along we embroil ourselves just a little too far to back out of we decide to let it go. If we go beyond this point, we have to go all the way.

The first Body Heat post is here. This is the last as I will move on to another neo noir (I haven't decided which yet) next week.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Body Heat Pt2: Some thoughts about women in noir and neo noir films
Most criminals are brutally stupid people who do stupidly brutal things. They don't make for good subjects for fiction. That is why there is so little really realistic crime fiction. Realism is always a series of stylistic conventions rather than actually realistic.

Dashiell Hammett's brilliant innovation was to realize that the only way you could make a story about the irrational people who actually commit crimes interesting was to write a story in which normal people end up interacting with them. In Hammett the normal person is usually the detective. Sam Spade was sleeping with his partner's wife and now his partner has been murdered. That is an interesting moral story. The three nuts pursuing the black bird would not be interesting  all by themselves. If you took characters such as Spade and the genuinely human moral tension out of them, most noir fiction would lose all its appeal.

Thus it is Ned Racine and his moral weaknesses that makes Body Heat interesting. But what about Matty Walker, the femme fatale. What is there for women in a character like this? And to ask that question honestly, we need to take seriously the possibility that the answer might be nothing at all. Obviously I am going to make the case that there is something.

An unreal person living a real life?
It seems to me that the first thing to note about Matty Walker is that the rough outline of her life is actually quite plausible. This is not a life that most people live but a depressing number of people do live lives not unlike it. Here it is in outline:

• She is the most beautiful girl in her high school and dreams of "being rich and living in an exotic land".
• Her unrealistic dreams lead her into bad choices including drugs.
• A guy bails her out, no doubt for less than idealistic reasons.
• Cleaned up and attractive again, she finds a better deal and trades up.
• Initially happy to be married to this wealthy guy, she starts to chafe at the restrictions and to tire of having sex with this "small, mean and weak" man.
• She finds another lover and soon begins plotting how to extract herself from this marriage taking the maximum amount of money with her.
• This new guy soon finds that he too is being used.

All of that is believable enough. What is hard to believe is that the woman who would do all these things could be anywhere near as intelligent, interesting and alive as Matty Walker as played by Kathleen Turner. I don't mean just that she looks better the way even bellboys in movies tend to look a lot better than they do in real life. I mean that she is far too human a person to have that biography. People who slide in and out of drugs and then commit murder are hollow vessels.

If you crave realism, this will disappoint you.

de-Baroquing the story
The key to making any sort of morale for real women out of a story like this is to smooth out the Baroque details and see the real life pattern that has been blown up into something fantastic. Make her,

•  A girl who had exotic dreams whose real life didn't match those dreams and is now in a relationship that she entered into for reasons that may have once felt like love but now feel purely pragmatic. She has lost all attraction for the man she is with and now is repulsed by him during sex. 
• She begins an affair with another man, swearing him to absolute secrecy, but slowly begins to wonder if there isn't some way to escape.
• All the time this is going on, it isn't clear whether she is really in love with this new man or just using him.

If you haven't known someone who did just that, then you haven't been paying attention. Most of us, if we are honest, will admit that, even if we haven't done quite that, we would be capable of falling into such a pattern if we just let things slide.

One of the really great things about a movie such as Body Heat is that it rewards repeated watchings. The first time, you can watch his story. The second time, you can watch hers. The merit is not the realism. This is fiction and never pretends to be anything but fiction. But it is fiction in which we can exercise our moral imagination. We can put ourselves inside her just feel like what it would be like.

For example, the sex. Why does she do it? Does she enjoy it? I think yes, but does she enjoy it because it feels good or does she enjoy it for the feeling of erotic power it gives her? Because you can imagine that. You could—if the idea appeals to you—fantasize about it. But what conditions would it take for you to actually enjoy doing something like that?

The answer to these questions are nobody's business but yours of course.

By the way, one of the fascinating things about fiction that doesn't pretend to be anything but fiction is the craft involved. Fans of Jane Austen will appreciate the way the story arc here is structured. The murder takes place in exactly the middle of the movie. There is a perfect story arc just like in an Austen novel. If we started drawing up a list of similarities with an Austen novel, we would find quite a few.


Part 3 is here.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Neo noir: Body Heat Pt1
For my money, this is the first real neo noir film. Yes, there were films such as Chinatown but they were too busy being homages to something. This is the first neo noir where the people making it were willing to get a little Gothic about it. They got right inside the conventions and had fun with them. I'll say more about why I think it works so well tomorrow.

(General note: This movie also comes with a heavy does dose* of eroticism. If you really don't like that sort of thing, you really won't like this movie. Your loss.)

* I hate auto-correct.

The manliness lesson
Ned Racine is a familiar type. Here he is:

And here is his car:

This is a guy we all dream of being and all feel some shame at the thought that we might become him. He was an undistinguished student who became an undistinguished lawyer. He just floats through life vaguely hoping that some big break will just land in his lap.

Ned's friend Lowenstein sums him up nicely when Ned asks why a judge he and Lowenstein have just argued a case before dislikes him.

He's an unhappy man, Thinks he should be Circuit Court by now. Here he is in a state with really top-notch corruption and he's stuck with the county toilets.

I'm surprised you weren't in on that toilet caper. Could have been that quick score you've always been searching for.

Except he doesn't really want the big score because he doesn't do anything to get it; he simple feels he deserves it. And this attitude prevails in his approach to women. When he first meets with Matty he has this conversation.

Ned: Me? I need tending. I need someone to take care of me. Rub my tired muscles. Smooth out my sheets.

Matty: Get married.

Ned: I just need it for tonight.

And here is where Body Heat does something that is really profound and perverse at the same time. Matty is the woman who inspires Ned to marry. And she inspires him to give up on feeling entitled and to work to really earn that big break he has always wanted. She also inspires him to be discreet about his love life and to really respect a woman for the first time in his life. And, in doing so, she lures him straight into an unholy travesty of everything that love and life are supposed to be.

In this movie it is Ned's willingness to overcome what he sees as weakness in himself that brings disaster on him.

I don't want to say more because I don't want to spoil what is a a perfect little movie. And I do mean perfect in the same way that The Third Man is perfect. Someone, I can't remember who, once said that that The Third Man is perfect because it doesn't aim too high. That is true here too. But such perfection.

One teaser for those who haven't seen it, there is a magnificent scene where the murder victim inadvertently inspires his murderer into killing him.

The aesthetics of manliness
The movie comes with the same heavy dose of nostalgia for the recent technological past I noted in Palmetto. Note the car above. That is the Corvette Sting Ray from the mid 1960s and not the 1970s model (simply called the "Corvette" because "Sting Ray" was no longer cool) that was apparently designed to resemble a penis. That earlier (non penis-like) Sting Ray used in the film is something only a man, and probably only a certain kind of man, would get but those of us who do get it instantly. The Sting Rays weren't painted but had a gel coat on the fiberglass body that faded in the sun just the way this one has. That is a dream car not a museum piece.

(Lawrence Kasdan brings this motif back in The Big Chill where William Hurt's character shows up in a bondo-grey coloured Porsche. As Ned might say, "It was just, perfect".)

The thing about all this technology is that it was all still around when this movie was made in 1981. None of it was collectable yet but there was a nostalgie de la boue that attached to this stuff for men.

Some of it was quite simple. If you went to a rundown movie theatre in 1981, you would have quite likely seen this popcorn machine.

That is perhaps confusing for some now because if you go to the very newest movie theatres, you will quite likely see a machine that is modeled on that one. In 1981, however, this machine was a sign of a world fast disappearing.

And if you go to a hip lunch place where all the trendy types go to today, it just might look like this.

But in 1981, this sort of place was rapidly disappearing. To find one, you had to go the parts of town trendy people wouldn't get caught dead in.

Again, some hip young executive would probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate this office today. In 1981, you'd find an office like this upstairs from a hardware store downtown where no one wanted to have their business located.

People forget how utterly horrible the 1970s were. Here is a simple background shot from the movie and nothing in it was meant to have special significance.

But note that car. That ugly red piece of crap was what the Ford Mustang had become by 1980. And ugly is as ugly does, no matter how appalling it may look, that is nothing compared to driving one of them. No wonder men rebelled. And movies like this embodied that feeling of rebellion.

Part 2.