WATCHERS' COUNCIL: Rough Draft - The Original of Buffy

"The pattern of the thing precedes the thing."
-Vladimir Nabokov

Into the Alley

So this blonde girl walks into a dark alley...

That's how it starts, right? It always starts this way.

This girl walks into an alley, and a vampire appears. It menaces her, attacks. She kicks its ass. This blonde girl walks into a dark alley and that's the premise, the inspirational flash that spawns all incarnations and cross-media franchise that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet somehow it never actually plays out that way. It is not how the TV series opens, nor the original film, nor Joss Whedon's shooting draft of the screenplay. They all begin with variants on the girl menaced, the alley, the monster, the switcheroo.


This girl would not even walk into an alley in the first place.
A mission statement is coded into this imagined scene, the conceptual spark that summarizes Joss Whedon's Buffy concept. The moment actually does play out roughly one hundred million times in the course of BtVS. Over and over, Buffy will combat monsters in dark alleys. Though this beat plays out in a hundred variations, we never hear the main theme. Each time through, we know the turnabout, know the reveal that Buffy is the Vampire Slayer. The dynamic only plays out with the surprise intact once: the first time one reads the title. Buffy... Buffy? THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. Her pattern precedes her.


Arches symbolize the heavens, eternity. Windows= portals, passages. Grids= structure, order. Cheerleaders= hot.
The 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer has all but been receded into those infinitely deep filing cabinets at Wolfram & Hart; absorbed into the tissue of Buffyverse mythos like a vanishing twin, failed and dissolved before birth. Comparisons are bound to favor the experience of the series for dozens of reasons, central among them that only enthusiasts of the television series would make such a comparison in any detail. The lens is warped, and it is nigh impossible to watch the movie (hereafter Buffy the Vampire Slayer) without referencing the television version (hereafter Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no italics). As the BtVS fan is nearly universally in the thrall of the creator's cult of personality, the proceedings may be colored by the very public grumblings of creator and executive producer Joss Whedon.

In interview with IGN, Whedon explains: "...it was right around the time when Revenge of the Bimbos, or Attack of the Killer Bimbos or something – there were a lot of movies coming out that were proto-silly '50s style titles. They were on the video store shelves. I worked at a video store. I would watch them, and I'd be like, 'You know what? This is just another bimbo movie. These women aren't empowered at all. They just made up a funny title.'..." The specific film he is thinking of is probably Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988), but video stores were awash with pseudo-(and-genuine)-Troma pictures like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988). The way Whedon tells it, the title plays out as a third-gen exploitation movie fan-artist's workbook exercise; like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), part of the goal is to deliver what other films promised but could/would not fulfill. In Buffy's case, actual empowered-girl turnabout. The title is a throwback —"proto-silly"? I suspect "pseudo-silly" is intended? — to pulp-tradition fantasy that reads as naive, kitschy or campy to modern audiences, regardless of the imagination or sophistication in the actual work.

Buffy aims to reconfigure a tradition that may or may not exist in reality. Conventional wisdom has it that women are persistently victimized in horror movies, that fictional monsters supernatural and human alike prey primarily on women, that the genre itself always sacrifices the blonde girl. It is not exactly true, as some more astute scholars like Carol J. Clover (Men, Women and Chainsaws) and Maitland McDonagh (Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds) have pointed out, horror cinema has a complicated attitude toward gender. But in plainspeak, no statistical studies exist to back up the anecdotal wisdom that female/ feminized victims are the victims of male monsters. It is just one of those things you Know To Be True, despite that Frankenstein's monster and Freddy Kreuger alike have studious interest in doing violence to men, and have been foiled by women who are not particularly masculinized. An equally convincing argument can be built that this most subversive genre has a rich tradition of female protagonists who escape and defeat the demons through specifically female virtues and strengths, a tradition too of the untamed feminine which survives pulsing through subterranean tunnels of folklore and pop culture.

Party Decorations: The Lite Ages

In any case, art and interpretation are not strictly a matter of statistic. These assumptions that an innate misogyny and single-minded viciousness toward women are universal in horror reveal a fairly naive reading of the function of horror genres. Horror's purpose is to horrify; to provide a frightening hyperbolic vision of the Way Things Are, the Way Things Might Be, our real world fears made metaphor, a bleak critique of our species' shortcomings. Thus, horror films from The Wolf Man (1941) to American Psycho (2000), whether as subtext or (with post-modern self-awareness) part of their agenda, examine the outer reaches of brutal male drives by depicting frightening appetites in extremis. If it is upsetting, it is supposed to be. Were it Whedon's project to undermine the gender politics of Gothic horror, we might rightfully ask if it is a useful, necessary or relevant goal. But that is not quite what the screenwriter is up to (thought for another day: a majority of scholarly work agrees that BtVS tends to reject and reenforce Gothic fiction tropes in equal measure).

All genre pieces are multi-genre pieces. It is foolish to insist (in example/strawman argument with which you may be familiar) that Alien is "not science-fiction but horror". It is, of course, science-fiction and horror. Specifically it's Ten Little Indians in the future on a spaceship with a creature-feature beast, and follows the same plot structure as a slasher picture. The relevant question is not "what genre is it 'really'?" but "to which familial genres does the film belong?" and "what cogent argument can be made when viewing the film as a member of a particular genre family?" BtVS, by Whedon's account above, was only partly designed to undermine various horror conventions and assumptions, but belongs to a small family of (supposedly) cheeky, campy post-modern satires of exploitation films. In effort to not simply turn horror tropes on their ear but provide correctives, BtVS inevitably spends more time being a superhero story than a horror story. It is partly a comic horror film, but more to the point, all incarnations of the "Buffy" mythos are superhero stories with Gothic trappings. Interesting, surely, and in this way — whether any embodiment of "Buffy" has adopted ideas from her sisters or not — part of yet another lineage: Doctor Strange (1963), Swamp Thing (1971), Marvel Comics' Werewolf by Night (1972) and Tomb of Dracula (1973), Jack Kirby's The Demon (1972), Blade (1973), Vampire Hunter D (1983), Todd McFarlane's Spawn (1992) all the way to Van Helsing (2004).

This extended sidetrack is relevant because we are at the sensitive spot of the "Buffy" concept's origin. Whedon's screenplay works with a rich stew of blended genres. When approaching and reworking the screenplay (variously in further drafts, preproduction, on the set or in post) Kuzui necessarily made decisions about the attitude and concerns of the piece; that is, with a concept working on so many levels, she had to choose which paths the film would hew to most closely. It is perfectly possible that BtVS could veer into the spirit of magical girl manga, or Elizabethan comedy or supernatural martial arts comedy. Those possibilities are all written into the screenplay, and should we forget the wide genre potentials built into the Buffyverse, Angel starts out as a vampiric noir detective yarn and evolves into Arthurian quest and high fantasy. Kuzui opts to cast BtVS as a very broad comic horror film, farcical cousin to An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Gremlins (1984). This is a perfectly noble tradition in itself and a valid choice, but not the only possibility provided by the script. More pointedly, it is not the direction Whedon would take when revising his concept for the television series.

Whedon has done a fair amount of public grousing about the realization of his screenplay by director Fran Rubel Kuzui. Any number of screenwriters could make similar complaints, of course, and may even release their unsullied screenplays for comparison, but few also have 240 hours of a fleshed-out personalized version of their vision to underline the point. The existence of an alternate take on the concept which — let us just say it — is richer, more ambitious, and frankly superior, tends to shift the authorship over to Whedon. It also puts the writer in position for constant questioning about what went wrong with the movie. The very question implies that Whedon's screenplay is wildly different, indeed better than, more than the film. A quick read confirms a less confused plot and more fully realized mythos were written than play out on screen. A closer study reveals the script is painted impasto-thick with theme and motif which have been excised from the film or survive only with a variation intact, a song with a chorus that arrives only once. These alterations, it must be said, do not serve to streamline the plot, strengthen the narrative backbone, or constrain the running time or budget. So the Whedon sympathizer is prone to speculate that Kuzui did not understand the story she was telling.

A running gag about the school dance's halfhearted environmental theme is entirely lacking in punchline ("What do we do with all these decorations?" "Throw them away!") and its link to Slayer-as-Savior/Protector in the larger scope. The Earth Day jokes in present day link to a Black Plague motif in the History of the Slayer flashback scenes — it's gone, so the link's gone, so the point is, well, it's gone. The relationship between villain and protagonist is muddled to the point of nonsense (more later). Another runner about a coveted yellow leather jacket misses its climax when Buffy is no longer interested in high fashion window shopping, but gazes with desire at a hardware store chainsaw display.

The screenplay begins with a carefully schematized comic action setpiece. In generically dirty Monty Python medieval times Italy, a knight errant enters an inn tended by a disinterested barmaid. A vampire attacks, the knight is helpless, but the barmaid leaps into action. There is a vital element in this sequence which bolsters the intent of the legendary Girl Walks Into an Alley scene: the knight. The clear-cut reversal is written into the scene, and the knight's comparative weakness is crucial in establishing an expectation to subvert. The finished film reworks the scene simply to establish a far-reaching lineage of Slayers, shows one in action, but does not set up the Slayer as a counter-tradition to male heroism. The film never offers a viable decoy male champion, thus cannot illustrate a reversal with any evidence but an imagined audience's presumed sexism. It does set up the Dark Ages Slayer in juxtaposition with Buffy, via sarcastic match cut between a triumpantly hoisted stake and a thrusting pom-pon — effective enough narrative shorthand. Though the shape of the story looks the same, the details pile up or don't pile up and deform the tale's purpose.

There is more to the Joss Whedon writing voice than grammatically inventive pithy teen slang, but that notorious sort of dialogue is, of course, a BtVS hallmark (the beloved "What's the sitch?" is one of the first lines). As with choice Whedon witticisms in Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000), Kuzui does not seem to comprehend the language layers built into the jokes, or at least doesn't choose takes in which her teen performers really nail the lines. This matters because besides stepping on the toes of comedy, it underlines that the actors have a nigh-impossible task. When granted creative control, Whedon's stories take their world, fantasy rules and characters seriously, providing the jokes a context that is, if not relentlessly sober, at least sincere. Kuzui vacillates between cartoonish comedy and action and comparatively overwrought Gothic horror and melodrama. Whedon's vision is an elegant blend of genres, Kuzui's is schizoid and tonally inconsistent.

In metaseries which retell roughly the same tale across multiple media (M*A*S*H to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Transformers), we often expect the major motion picture incarnation to represent the "ultimate" version of the story. The scale, budget, compacted running time, and inflated expectations of a movie lend themselves to a version playing out as pop myth writ large. In big screen scope, even intimate character stories like The X-Files, or sparely staged idea-dramas like Star Trek tend to inflate their scenarios into legends, characters into IconGods. We might expect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to play out as the concise, focused, distilled but grandest vision of Buffy Summers' story, and the TV show to be the more textured, detailed but smaller-scaled version. Instead the film is the miniature reenactment, the series the epic. The movie is a rinky-dink thumbnail sketch when compared even to the screenplay. The temptation to consider the film a rough draft for the TV show is too great...

The Chain, Take One

If this is a rough draft, then, we should be able to discern the outlines of the more developed product. The basics of Slayer mythos are here: the Chosen One, the Watcher, the vampires. The general shape of Buffy's arc is in place: resistance to the calling, initiation, lifestyle conflict, despair over choicelessness, the forging of choice in the face of bad faith, finally integration, paradigm busting. The Girl and the Slayer make peace.

The eye starts to rove... are embryonic versions of major BtVS character dynamics present, coiled and waiting to pop? Certainly the shifting father figure/codependent pal relationship between Buffy and Giles is established early in the Buffy/Merrick relationship. Everything being large-writ, designed for one-time use, Giles' stuffiness, British gentility and etc. etc. manifest as Merrick's complete disconnect from the modern world — he is immortal, his soul born repeatedly into new bodies but (plausibility iffy here) social skills never upgraded. Giles is Old World, but Merrick is Really Old World. This "immortal Watcher" device is a nascent version of the way the Council of Watchers stands in for patriarchal tradition in the series. Buffy constantly quarrels with Merrick, but the Giles and Council figures being rolled into one, she never really rebuffs him, never breaks ties as spectacularly as with the Council.

The series' full relationship with the film is complex. Mutant Enemy does not wipe the slate entirely, nor are they shy about making bold alterations. Certain elements work in the tightened elbow room of a feature film, and pushing back the heroine's age from senior to sophomore, jettisoning Buffy's caricatured L.A. socialite mom, and the Slayer's abdominal cramping vamp detection system (a wonderful, perfect, audacious touch) provide space for workable long-term replacements. Simultaneously retaining the Movie-Buffy in continuity allows Mutant Enemy to avoid pedantic restaging of the origin story, and to piggyback on the character arc experienced in the film. Movie-Buffy begins as a true Valley Girl stereotype, mired in privileged L.A. mall culture, at the top of the high school social food chain, and exceptionally mean, catty, shallow and stupid. Her dumbness and cruelty are gradually revealed as a sort of choice. Buffy does not need to be smart or empathetic and these qualities are not valued by her peer group. They won't get her anywhere, so she sees no need to develop them. Simply put, being forced into the position of protector of humanity forces Buffy to examine her own humanity. Though nowhere near as bright or perceptive, Buffy starts her arc in roughly the same place as Cordelia Chase (Cordy is shallow, Movie-Buffy is vapid), and is given a similar social clique/chorus of followers. As the television show is constructed, partially acknowledging that the film's events "happened," Mutant Enemy gets to have it both ways: Cordelia can play foil to Buffy, and Buffy can endure a steeper change in character for those who recall the film.


An Exchange of Butts.
Buffy's major internal conflict is rather solved in the finale, though not nearly as gloriously as on the series, where the battle between The Slayer and The Girl is a series of negotiations and metaphor-charged blowouts. Movie-Buffy does integrate headstrong Modern Gal-ness with the warrior tradition on her own terms, but as it is in shorthand, the transformation is neither so big nor so complex. In her final crisis, Movie-Buffy does arrive at the school dance both stag and attempting to ditch The Slayer: she shows up in a bosom-boosting white dress and sans weapons. Scruff-ball love interest Pike gives her the final nudge, accepting both Buffy and the Vampire Slayer — the boy arrives with a kiss and a bag of stakes. It's not so much that Buffy needs final a final seal of male approval so much as that she is encouraged by Pike's receptivity. This would not be a proper climax for the TV show, where Buffy has varied and complicated relationships with the men in her life, and the narrative space to explore them. Pike, in certain light, bundles Buffy's relationships with key series characters Spike, Xander, Riley, and parts of Angel and Giles into one figure, later exploded out into five men's arcs in full. All these fellows are/become comfortable with a woman fighting at their side, most of them to accept that she is stronger. This is not, of course, all they have to offer Buffy, but it is a vital function of Pike in the film. Pike stands in direct contrast to the rest of the boys and vampire-boys of his peer group who can only objectify the cheerleader.


Butt Exchange: Resolution.
The extremely game Luke Perry plays Pike with bad boy appeal — he's an unkempt slacker (Xander), on the fashion fringe and comfortable with a degree of camp in his DNA (Spike; the rest of the comic rough trade swagger is funneled into/out of Paul Reubens as the vampire Amilyn) and gives good mysterious brood while masking insecurities (Angel) — while also being knocked on his ass a dozen times. Had BtVS more bite (sshh) and Beverly Hills 90210 been a larger cultural force, Perry would deserve some kind of award for cheerfully subverting his own pouty teen hearthtrob image. The movie is not as toothsome, the actor not as funny, but for project selection Perry is rather besting the trick Johnny Depp did with Cry-Baby (1990). The screenwriter and Perry are thwarted, but the actor seems to grasp Whedon's intentions. In the vintage EPK preserved on the DVD, Perry gives the only remarkable soundbite, enthusing that his job in the film is to play damsel in distress. In the film's motivating joke, the reversal and demolition of horror tropes, Perry's assessment dead-on. Best gag example: while vamp fighting, Pike and Buffy end up rolling on the ground, stop, girl on top. Did he save her butt? Did she save his butt? "Well. There was sort of an exchange of butts," concedes Pike. He's got it. They've swapped. To this end, Perry plays Pike's coolness and slack-appeal as genuine and his respect for Buffy straight.


Giles would probably not throw a knife at Buffy's head this early in the relationship.
The film's notion that Slayer and Watcher are eternally reincarnated souls (obviously stricken from the TV record) does not seem to originate with Whedon, for the screenplay describes something aligned with television Buffyverse rules. It is problematic, for the Slayer remembers nothing but dream impressions of past lives, while the Watcher retains everything, self-awareness included. Some of Whedon's conflicts with Donald Sutherland revolve around the star rewriting his own dialogue at whim and in ways the writer believed made no sense. This element of the Watcher backstory is very likely a prime example. This inconsistency in logistics may be read another way. Hypothetically, were the Slayer reincarnated with full knowledge and ability, there would be no need for a Watcher. The film provides no origin myth for the Slayer, but the very inclusion of a male Watcher who wields authority over the Slayer implies that the Powers That Be of this world have rigged the game to keep the Slayer in check. Pity that Whedon cannot enjoy it, for Sutherland's performance as Merrick is the film's best. He makes the hoary wise man stuff natural, the fish out of water material funny. Like Perry, Sutherland has a finger on the pulse of his character, even if he found the mythology uninteresting.

She Kicks Its Ass

In the Universe's carnival, the squirrels wear tutus.
The grandest muddle of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is at the center of the plot, as globetrotting, centuries-old Vampire King Lothos arrives in L.A. to menace the latest Slayer. Kuzui's choice to have Kristy Swanson play all versions of the Slayer gives this element of the story a slight boost, lending the feeling that the whole cast is just reciting the latest verse of a song that never ends. Rutger Hauer looks puffed and tired in Halloween cape, costume jewelry and unflattering mustache, but acts at full bore, as if his dialogue about linked destinies, inexplicable violin playing, and one-sided romantic link to the Slayer make any damn kind of sense.


JOINED?
There will be exploration in the TV mythos of power dynamics which echo through the halls of eternity. But the film offers nothing so elegant as Spike's poetic episode-long monologue on the hunter-beast waltz in "Fool for Love" or Holland Manners' discourse with Angel on Existentialist ethics in an elevator in "Reprise". A best guess is that BtVS is shooting for something like this, and either Whedon aims too high or Kuzui too low. Lothos' forever-task being to confront, confound, and destroy the Slayer, he goes to enormous lengths to throw himself in Buffy's path. He works overtime to orchestrate their face to face meeting, preps to eat her, then changes his mind for no discernible reason. The excuse that "she's not ready" is intriguing, but goes nowhere. Lothos forestalls the conflict until later, again insists they are "joined" (even Buffy doesn't know what to make of this, and with grossed-out face: "Joined?")... and gives utterly baffling speeches in which he fights Buffy with a sword then announces "I could never hurt you... I'm gonna send you to the pits of Hell!" (... Joined?) Again, a guess. Has Lothos been killing Slayers so long that he simply feels obligated? Or gone mad and believes he is fulfilling a cosmic role? Or in communion with greater forces confirming this duty? No telling. Lothos lacks any apparent motivation beyond vaguely indicated pattern of repetition. Rather than potent subtext, this can only read as storytelling contrivance. Metafictionalists from Resnais to Antonioni to De Palma might make this a theme unto itself but... nah, it's just sloppy storytelling.


The Master, Angel and Spike X 2, First Pass. Includes bonus/confused multiple Christ symbols.
In the rearview, Lothos obviously contains the seeds of Season One villain The Master, a vampire cult leader who appears in prophecy and whose presence forces Buffy to fulfill her role in the same (see under: "Prophecy Girl", no less); The Master is locked beneath Sunnydale for a century, as if waiting to synch up with Buffy's stride. Their fates are bound like Lothos and Movie-Buffy's are implied to be "joined." Lothos appears in Buffy's dreams as potential lover. In the film's only eerie sequence, Buffy's vulnerable, nightgown'd dream self leans back in bed, not noticing that she is snuggling into the Vampire King's embrace. Lothos is, then, also proto-Angel, star-aligned lover (metaphorically on film, literally on TV) whose darkness gives Buffy a brutal push into the light and ultimately provides some strength and motivation in breaking the Slayer paradigm. We may see a pinch of Spike, too, in Lothos' otherwise nonsensical obsession with the linked fates of Slayer and Vampire. If Spike called it a dance, then Lothos plays the tune on his fiddle.


Amazon. Jungle. Keen fashion sense.
And there is a Buffy at the center of this whirl, golden, health-glowing Kristy Swanson. Gaspingly funny when deadpanning "What a homeless!" at her first glimpse of Merrick, and affecting when mourning her Watcher's death, Swanson makes a bold and vigorous Buffy. This is Movie-Buffy as written. Of all the inevitable comparisosn, Swanson to Sarah Michelle Gellar is the least fair. Swanson's Buffy has neither Gellar's wrenching vulnerability, petite frame, or sparkly, wiry verve, but she needs none of it: that's TV-Buffy. What Swanson does have is a completely different comic bounce, and in her few opportunities to plumb for tenderness and pathos, she wrings as much out of the scenes as is possible. Here is a genre satire about those blonde sexpots that walk into alleys and are punished for being blonde girls in alleys. The television series will rotate this concept in every possible direction, but for this straightforward inversion of tradition, Swanson is the more intuitively correct Buffy. Had the film gone for the mythic, fated tone of the screenplay — and even in its final, compromised state — Swanson's take makes perfect sense. Athletic, strong-boned, sexed-up and sweaty, she is a goddess-Buffy, idealized and ideal.

Once upon a time, a blonde girl walked into an alley... It always starts this way.

Who Is the Coolest?: Lee Marvin’s Shirttails in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955)

The geography for the stage of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, set in 1945) is a massive barbell, choked in the middle by the single street of Black Rock, opening at either end into dusty orange desert vistas. John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) arrives by ghost train at one end of the street, wanders back and forth to solve a mystery that resides somewhere in the wasteland at the other end. There is a story of the hard, bitter little city, the sins of all one-dozen-or-so residents, and the status of a missing Japanese farmer given the improbable name “Komoko”; this is the narrative meat proper, but the skeleton of Black Rock is filled out -- or picked away and revealed -- as the camera approaches each of these desert lizard-people as mysteries unto themselves. Macreedy is the town’s first visitor in four years, and the locals hate him before he steps into town, eyeing the slowing train with silent panic and confusion. Once they have to interact with him, every conversation is an exercise in concealing data, lying, talking circles around the topic. Getting information out of these people is like pulling teeth, and even the small talk is a particularly harsh enamel scraping.

So this is the shape of the Bad Day, Macreedy pacing and studying the land, everyone engaged in a game of Who Is the Coolest?, until all players crack and all secrets are outed. Each piece of character backstory or nugget of truth about their universe is hard won -- by Macreedy in most rounds, though sometimes he has to give some ground in the short view so an opponent will lower his guard. Who he is and what he wants, being the question actively playing on every set of lips in Black Rock, are the cards Macreedy won’t show until absolutely necessary. The allegorical wireframe about quiet, stoic heroism and insulated communities who poison their own wells is overlaid with the paper-mâché skin of its residents and weather-blasted buildings. The Bad Day is about a lot of things, macro and micro: the interment of Japanese-Americans during the second World War, the Hollywood blacklist, American racism, mob violence, the myth of the American West and various untenable molds of masculinity. The story in whole chews on these thoughts, the scenes are of people chewing on each other. So after a fashion, Bad Day’s scenes are driven by a question which is not “What Happened to Komoko?” but: “Who Is the Coolest?” This death match is determined through the gradual accumulation of curious details, actorly peculiarities; the Bad Day is the process of grit settling into grooves.

Macreedy keeps one -- presumably useless -- arm stiff at his side, fist shoved deep into jacket pocket. Unseasonable black off-the-rack suit adhering to his torso, Macreedy’s sweat soaks through the fabric as he ambles about in the blazing sun; Tracy looks like a baked potato seeping butter through aluminum foil wrapping as he rolls about on a very large grill. He makes some kind of point of remaining uncomfortable in the heat, ordering hot coffee at lunch to accompany a bowl of chili, and later claims he is the kind of man who has “never thought much” about lemonade. In that particular competition, Macreedy wins against a nerve-jangled telegraph operator in just a few moves, and the poor fellow is starry-eyed in terror that he has met a man who has never even thought about lemonade.

Pete Wirth (John Ericson who later teamed up with Anne Francis again for Honey West on TV), the dumbbell hotel clerk seems to want to deny Macreedy a room because he makes a visual rhyme with the “one-armed bandit” slot machine in the corner. In an entrancing bit of business, Tracy opens a fresh pack of cigarettes with one hand. There is dialogue, perhaps it is even plot-related, but the whole picture is suddenly about the tension and marvel of Macreedy popping the wrapper and biting off confetti strips of the inner foil, spitting the paper to the floor.

The back of Lee Marvin’s shirt refuses to stay tucked into his pants throughout the day. He fixes it at least twice, and it flaps around like a lazy flag. It is not really a wonder, since Marvin keeps covertly maneuvering his big log-limbed scarecrow body into contorted positions. Here his angry idiot ranch hand, called Hector, sprawls half-propped-up across Macreedy’s rented bed. James Dean strikes a similar pose in Giant, lazily stretching across the width of the screen, a little house on the horizon appearing to plop into his lap; Hector has climbed inside that building, legs poking out the windows like a cowpoke Alice in Wonderland, as Macreedy studies him, a sedated Bill the lizard. In another interesting shot, Hector leans his elbow against a wall some four feet away from his torso, surely providing more stress on his frame than relief. Hector picks postures for maximum silhouette impact. Hector has the moves and spirit of intimidation down flat, his signature feint being to act weird and simmer with vaguely motivated violence. But he gets flummoxed fast, mainly by Macreedy’s technique of questioning the literal logic of any insinuated threat. Long enough to look like he’s going to bow the hotel bed, boots surely ruining the bedspread, and glowering intently at his burning cigarette, Hector’s materialization in Macreedy’s room is a calculated intrusion of lanky non sequitur. In this match, Hector loses, unable to be more startling than an old man in a bathrobe who refuses to act the least bit surprised.

Meanwhile, Ernest Borgnine as Coley chortles and bounces about like a fleshy rubber ball with a grinning, google-eyed goblin face painted on it. He is giggly with delight over the opportunity to bully anyone, as if he has been deprived of opportunity for years. Macreedy stares at Coley, memorizes his opponent’s malevolent hop-about, until Coley dances to the end of his chain, and lashes out in a vehicular attack on a desert road, and in a perhaps even greater violation, dumps a whole bunch of ketchup all over Macreedy's chili. Macreedy seems to endure the outbursts only to gather facts and figures, place the violence in a diagram of Coley’s attack pattern. Next time the issue is raised, Macreedy swats Coley out of the way like a slow-pitch softball. It's one-armed judo precision against an inept berserker telegraphing his moves.

John J. Macreedy makes his way to the outskirts of Black Rock, to the ruins of Komoko’s farm at Adobe Flats. He paces. He crouches. He studies the depth of a well, the composition of the dirt, the flora of the area. It takes three minutes, and he has sized up the situation. Adobe Flats gives up all the backstory that the citizens will not; the dirt and plants and rocks and holes do not care who is coolest.

“I believe a man is as big as what'll make him mad,” Reno Smith tells Macreedy. The town heavy is Robert Ryan, whose career-long refinement of tough-souled goodies and baddies suppressing a psychotic streak is distilled into this pared-away Big Boss tyrant. Reno holds the town in hand by virtue of a few more IQ points, and at least understands the game they are playing. Do not flinch, do not back away, do not break eye contact first: Who is the Coolest? He is actually “mad” all the time, constantly fuming at flunkies Coley and Hector, and the entire colony of Black Rock. What he really means, though, is that man-size is determined by what makes a fellow completely lose his shit. For Reno, and by his own account, it took Pearl Harbor. So he’s at least as big a man as the entire country. And what’s bigger than that? For Macreedy, it takes the whole of the species’ fears, cowardice, inhumanity and intolerance.

Both men have already erupted in loud preaching, but only one lost an arm fighting for the country; the other incited a mob to murder. Reno gives a flame-eyed speech about desire to protect the Western country he knows, while Macreedy’s righteous rant is truly about personal bravery and individuality, his breaking point breached when the nitwit hotel clerk is too chickenshit to stand up for himself. When these symbolmen finally duke it out, it’s Reno the enraged, irrational, indignant going nuts with a gun, while Macreedy, beleaguered and persecuted, defends himself with methodical Molotov cocktails. All speechifying becomes irrelevant. Everything they mean and stand for is observable in how they fight, defined by their combat in the last round of Who is the Coolest? If Reno is the Big Boss of Black Rock, Macreedy has him beat. He’s bigger than the whole damned town.

Meanwhile, Hector’s shirttails flop out again, and billow in the hot breeze.

Ghost Train: The Lost Pauline Kael Review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

This post is in participation with Cinemastyles’ Spirit of Ed Wood Blog-A-Thon, organized in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Plan 9 From Outer Space, but covering any and everything remotely related to Mr. Wood... or that exudes that rare Ed Wood Feeling. Put a bookmark in your copy of Death of a Transvestite, pour a glass of Imperial whiskey and get busy reading! Most of the articles are along the lines of re-(re)-evaluating Wood’s life and work, but Exploding Kinetoscope offers a special history-making report.

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Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies, the 1965 book spanning her pre-New Yorker work from 1954-1965, is generally understood to be the critic’s first collected volume. Following Kael’s death in 2001, references were found in personal papers to a small press volume predating the publication of I Lost It, though no copy was located in Kael’s personal collection. After several years of scrambling and red herring sniffing by film historians, Kael obsessives, and rare book collectors, only a handful of copies (three in total, two complete, none in better than VG condition) have surfaced. Going Down On the Movies, (according to indicia) published by Trap Street Press, 1960, collects various Kael juvenilia, scattered previously published reviews from KPFA radio broadcasts and pieces from magazines (City Lights, Holiday, McCall's, etc.) not represented in I Lost It – even a small collection of screening notes and capsule reviews handed out to patrons of the Berkeley Cinema Guild in the late ‘50s.


The two copies of Going Down to enter the marketplace were snatched up at four-figure prices (on AbeBooks for $1200 and a tense eBay auction closing at $3650). Luckily, one fell into the hands of a rare bookseller in Los Angeles, who has graciously allowed a digital scan of the cover, and photocopying of the following excerpt. Special thanks to Blue Room Books of Los Angeles.

The Exploding Kinetoscope proudly presents Pauline Kael’s review of Plan 9 From Outer Space, reprinted for the first time since 1960.

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GHOST TRAIN

With the unfancy plainness of a nightmare being reported by The March of Time, anything goes in "Plan 9 From Outer Space", so long as it is weird, shuddery, sexed-up and antisocial. Martians [sic] with a taste for the sensual (they wear satin pajamas, their space-aircraft carrier shaped like a mammary gland... one is named “Eros”) and distaste for Earthly violence, resolve to end the arms race. Along for the ride, and part of that Ninth Plan, are marching ghouls who handle the dirty work – they’re freak-cartoon parodies of lives no one ever lived: a vampy wastrel beatnikess, a rasping butterball Swede cop, and Bela Lugosi.

“Plan 9 From Outer Space” is set and shot in the corners of Los Angeles where most movies would not be caught dead — the far-ends of choked boulevards where traffic wears out, the dollhouse suburbs of Burbank, and subterranean studios which house pateboard sets, painted cloth backdrops indicating skies and lumpy rugs serving as grass. The matter-of-fact presentational style of director Edward Wood is so honest and unglamorous that the homemade anonymity of the sets seems to be a point unto itself. Wood also wrote the swozzled script, which keeps throwing out corkers until they finally pile up into something like thematic unity. There’s a satirist’s glee in the movie’s conundrum about violence and military secrets, and before you know it the American heroes and the hostile spacemen have swapped places; the visitors have come to halt the progress of advanced weapons before we blow ourselves away, but their deadly Plan 9 is like beating a dog for chasing squirrels. Everybody’s wrong, but it’s hard to hate them for it. It’s an evolutionary and political stalemate. A little scaredy-cat cop rolls up his sleeves, climbs into a grave and groans “why do I always get hooked up with these spook details?” — Hamlet, gravedigger, and Stan Laurel rolled into one. The human scale is always dragged back into it. A compassionate colonel tells us “Then they attacked a town. A small town, I’ll admit, but nevertheless a town of people. People who died.” We're all eventually hooked up on spook detail. One hopes that future doomsday comedies will have the guts not to hammer the jokes to the wall, the sophistication not to drown the horror in cynicism or sheer scale. Whenever the movie paints itself into a political corner it drops the brush and levitates over the wet floor: a square-jaw reacts to a (hypocritical) pacifistic alien’s speech by popping his opponent in the mouth.

The kitsch has handily been drained out of the material in advance thanks to the spare, rawboned style. In a brainstorm of flying saucers, misty cemeteries, walking corpses, plastic skeletons, and cadaverous vampires, Wood keeps piling up the spook show gimmicks until they achieve a kind of loony grandeur. The picture isn’t overly fat (and it runs 79 minutes), but it’s maybe a little crazy. Wood is like a carnival barker doing a last push before closing time, but when you climb into this ghost train, the insides aren’t all hype, but crisp, chilly, and fresh. The spirit of Nouvelle Vague hangs about this spookhouse. Though the camerawork offers no pyrotechnics, Wood slices Lugosi’s death scene short — when the old fellow is splattered by a speeding auto, the shot cuts off with his consciousness, a life compacted into ten seconds of smelling a flower and being creamed by an unseen Packard. In the middle of languid scenes, the jump cuts bounce us to unexpected perspectives. With clever miniatures and a bizarre but striking eye for stock footage, Wood places his spaceships over freeways and television studios. Nowhere particularly photogenic, just someplace real.

“Plan 9” also merges the threadbare, daily life reality of Hollywood (the neighborhood, not the fairyland) and Burbank with the wooziest, spookiest dreamworld since “The Mummy”. In that film, Karl Freund’s camera caressed every crease in Boris Karloff’s makeup, as if his cadaverous cheeks were dusted with fragments of ancient broken hearts. Edward Wood slides into a similar thick, fever-dream pool for all the spook stuff. His ghouls shuffle toward us out of a black velvet void, or appear in their weird Gothic glory in the middle of tatty suburban bedrooms. And like in so many very bad dreams, everyone screams and flinches and motions to escape, but doesn’t seem able to run. The way the young lady playing Lugosi’s wife (“Vampira” the film hostess from television, and a sex kitten, sure, but with a dead rat in her mouth) moves her body, we can’t be sure she was alive in the first place. In the clammiest scene, a rotund police detective rises from his grave, and the darkness swirling around the hole makes his whitened visage into a morbid, grimacing moon.

Burly Tor Johnson plays Inspector Clay as a giant in body and spirit. He’s one of those fellows that was built for underlings to scurry beneath and hang by their fingernails from his every word. The big man gives off erotic energy like an oil drum on fire, even when no women are around. When he laughs off danger, chuckling to a pal “I’m a big boy now, Johnny!,” we half expect Johnny to sigh “don’t I know it!” Johnson looks so fierce among a cast of scrawny beat cops that we imagine no force in the rest of the movie could tangle with him: this guy could eat two of those flying saucers for breakfast. So when the most magnetic character in the picture does, in fact, meet his match, nothing could be tenser. Maybe no death on the screen has had such emotional wallop since “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. Thankfully, Johnson isn’t entirely out of the picture after this — his white-eyed creep is a walking case of the heebie-jeebies.

“Plan 9” never loses that sexiness, though it admittedly decreases once Inspector Clay goes mute (he becomes less a villain than a beautiful, melancholy bear, befuddled and forced by captors to maim enemies). When appealing hero Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott, who shone for a brief moment as an MP in the dismal “Mister Roberts”) heads off on military mission and says goodbye to his wife, Paula. We start to roll our eyes, because it’s the sappiest of scenarios, lovers parted, the warrior going off to battle. We’re expecting fake feelings, false nobility, unwarranted nobility, maybe all three. But the music starts purring strange lazy draubs of Martin Denny style jazz, Paula coos to Jeff that she’s intending to maul his pillow as a substitute lover. It’s very probably the wiggiest, earthiest expression of libidinal heat between married people ever put on screen. The Trents job in any other movie would be as bloodless good citizens; Wood and his actors make Jeff burn at his center with righteous indignation (at anyone, everything), and Paula is flush with good humor. Between the Trents, Insepctor Clay and the shouty little monkey cop, the Earthlings are a rowdy, worthy crew to go up against the wacked out spacemen and, for that matter, their haunted, soulless dead slaves. The movie is a whole funfair midway full of interesting folks. Among the aliens, Dudley Manlove plays the funniest, Eros, as a big soft baby, always raging, petulant, or sleepy. When he rants about the logical conclusion of the human arms race— a hair-raising vision of a sun-exploding bomb — Manlove's apoplexy blows off the screen, making the whole idea of 3D movies look superfluous. As Eros' boss, John Breckenridge marshals a queenly regality — he’s somehow swishy and sinister and a lot of fun. As he explains the science of how the dead will be animated, the details are authentic sounding, but The Ruler yawns through it like the caterpillar in “Alice in Wonderland”.

Presiding over the other characters, famous TV personality Criswell narrates, sometimes on screen, and he sounds mournful and despairing, his eyes look off into the netherworld distance. He warns of Death the Proud Brother, of time and fate and doom locked in confusing dance, and even insinuates that some of these screen devils may follow us out of the theater. "Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it... for they will be from outer space,” he says, the perfect parody embodiment of this age’s anxieties — Space Race, invisible agents, privacy violation. Almost all of Cris’s speeches have some knockout idea buried in the poetry. Wood the screenwriter uses him like a Biblical prophet coming down from Mount Lee, to articulate his most lyrical themes.

“Plan 9”’s greatest trick is one I don’t think we’ve ever seen on a movie screen. Edward Wood turns hokey kid’s Poverty Row stuff into something freaky; he doesn’t try for glitz and fail, neither does he wallow. It’s easier to say what “Plan 9” is not than what it is. The movie spins like a Hula Hoop, gyrating between slightly stoned slice-of-life skits, the inspired blood-curdling stuff, grungy reality and, we may as well go ahead and say it, the strangest dreams expressed on film since Dreyer, or maybe Méliès. Waking up from a dream — and so with “Plan 9 From Outer Space” — we’re stupefied for a second. What just happened? Criswell asks us the impossible question: “Can you prove it didn’t happen?”

The X-Files: Three Smokes at the Jazz Bar

The season 5 X-Files finale, "The End", offers many memorable images --from a tiny psychic nerd-boy playing championship chess in a crowd of faceless thousands to Scully and Mulder silently embracing in their blackened, melting, dripping office after a symbolic act of arson, red and blue emergency lights strobing over them-- and some remarkable moments from the performers (the best: Scully spots Mulder privately conferring with his previous X-Files partner, Diana Fowley, retreats to her car and silently fumes with jealousy, then frets over what she's feeling, and a few other nameless emotional beats, before Gillian Anderson even speaks a word).

But one exterior shot on the mean streets of Vancouver provides a fleeting delight most viewers will never notice.

Cigarette Smoking Man exits Jazz Bar, en route to some dirty business. When suddenly... here comes trouble!

William B. Davis goes about his business, and looks so smoothy malevolent that we pick him out instantly in this wide shot. But look out, CSM: Two cool dudes are cruising up the sidewalk!


Let us move in for a closer look.

Sporting identical big sneakers, caps, windbreakers, mustaches, they are the kind of men who enjoy cigarettes on a fine Vancouver day. And on this day, they have worked up a mutual appetite for either some B.C.-style jazz, a bar, or, as luck would have it, both.

These local boys likely do not know or care for anything involving mind-reading alien-human hybrids, intergalactic colonization, or shadow government assassins!

But they should look out, as they are about to run into at least one of those.


CSM stops and looks around, and our mustache buddy in shades nearly runs into him. But this cool customer just stops short of plowing into Bill Davis, sees that his friend has turned to enter Jazz Bar, and does a hitch step to catch up!


It remains unclear if the fellows in hats had any idea an X-Files scene was shooting. ...if they were supposed to nearly mow down one of the stars on the sidewalk. ...if William Davis noticed this run-in.

Such are the mysteries of The X-Files.

Astounding DVD Covers! #2: Combat Training

LITTLE SHOP Handbook: Visual Strategies in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

Visual Strategies in Little Shop of Horrors

Director Frank Oz blocks the Little Shop of Horrors actors in stylized tableaux in every scene, usually for the duration of each separate shot. While actors are given free reign to emote in unrestrained fashion, their location and movements within the shots in dialogue scenes are always as precisely choreographed as the dance numbers. This rarely occurs as normalized two-shots or singles, except as pushed into extreme image through rack focus revealing further visual information, off-center angle or sundry weird technique.

There are no "normal" (or "boring"/expected) shots in this studio-bound film, nor any naturalistic ones. In the loosest-feeling sequences dominated by actors given over to manic ad-libbing — those in which Arthur Denton (Bill Murray) visits Dr. Scrivello's (Steve Martin) office, and Wink Wilkinson (John Candy) conducts a radio interview — Oz allows the performers to roam a bit more, and his camera to follow some minor wanderings. There are also a few scenes with actors pacing within limited space (Rick Moranis as Seymour is prone to this, as is James Belushi as marketing pitchman Patrick Martin), but all these counter-examples are shot and blocked to diagram power relationships and create popping, graphic images as well. The Denton/Scrivello scene is loose inside a few nervous pans to follow Murray, but these shots work toward punctuation marks formed by actors' postures, the location of bodies within the frame. No character prowls the space purposelessly, or occupies uncomposed space in the frame.

The staging of Little Shop of Horrors is perpetually "stagy." It is not stagy, however, in the sense of being only suited to the stage. Oz may have lifted/transfered some of the blocking from the off-Broadway production (should anyone be in possession of tapes made of the original production, please contact this writer), with "musical staging" by Edie Cowan. This is natural for an adaptation of a stage production, and it is unremarkable for a musical film to adapt the stylized techniques of classical Hollywood forerunners; our purpose is simply to catalog some of Oz's strategies for organizing the film. Though the source is a theatrical production and the original 1960 film —respectively bound to the diorama of the stage and Roger Corman's grungy hemmed-in sets and catch-as-catch-can location shots — the show has been reconfigured, the story retold in aggressively cinematic language. Little Shop of Horrors is stylized, and it is stylized for the movies.

I - Paired Profiles

The placement and posture of bodies within compositions always looms large among directorial concerns; Little Shop of Horrors always arranges its performers for both dramatic purposes and graphic impact. Among the visual body-prop motifs in Little Shop of Horrors are a large number of shots in which two performers face one another in full profile. While not an uncommon viewing angle of conversing persons in real life, it is not a common blocking for stage performers, particularly in musicals, as it tends to swallow the voice and cut off actors from an audience. It is also uncommon for a film to block and shoot so many scenes in this fashion. Shooting eye contact from the side throws up a proscenium between the screen and audience; the angle cuts off an audience from looking into an actor's eyes and sharing the gaze available in an over-the-shoulder shot or face-forward angle. Freeze-framing a dialogue scene in more naturalistic films may capture moments of actors in face-off profile, and certainly similar shots occur in other films, but Little Shop of Horrors uses the image in a pattern of frequent and prolonged shots. Though a "weak" stage position for actors, it is graphically bold in a visual medium.

A majority of these dual profile shots are used while charting the progress of Seymour's burgeoning relationship with Audrey. The second largest number of these shots document the verso: Seymour's destructive relationship with Audrey's dark twin, Audrey II. A handful of others feature other characters paired with Seymour, and one — literally striking — example does not feature Seymour at all. Below are screencaps of ten prominent examples of this shot.


a) Audrey and Seymour consider a friendly shopping excursion to spruce up the nerd's wardrobe. Both brighten at the prospect of socializing outside the workplace, and excitement blooms. They have just bonded over a rush-job floral arrangement for Mrs. Shiva, the bouquet (augmented with glued-on glitter) appears between them, signals the positive outcome of their teamwork. In their small world, with the limited expectations of Skid Row, and narrow set of personal standards, depending on one's empathy levels, they are either good at what they do, or simply sympathetic to one another — i.e., Seymour thinks Audrey has good aesthetic sense. The moment she is encouraged by Seymour's attention, feels herself valued by a kind man, she remembers she has a date with her current abusive paramour and wilts. The flowers become a funeral bouquet once more, and Audrey turns from Seymour, breaking the dual profile composition.


b) Audrey II exhibits its first signs of sentience as Seymour serenades the plant during the "Grow For Me" number. A Seymour-POV shot of the plant making kissy-suction movements with its lips and a low angle nearly from Audrey II's perspective as Seymour squeezes blood drops into its open pod surround this shot of dual profiles. These angles confirm plot information — Seymour's gives visual confirmation that the plant is moving, Audrey II's that it has a "perspective" equal to a human character — and intersect with another motif, that of unexpected POV shots. The profiles, as before, highlight a change in one of Seymour's principle relationships, as the plant and the horticulturist study one another in a new light and from this angle we may survey the tensions in both gazes.


c) "Does this look inanimate to you, punk?" growls Audrey II and, sliding a chair under Seymour, yanks him forward into an echo of their first shared profile shot. In each of the profile moments, Seymour comes face to face with new information about other characters. Here, the power dynamic shifts dramatically, as Seymour begins his move from caretaker to slave. This is a seduction scene, Audrey II displaying physical threat and prowess, appealing to both Seymour's base material lusts ("money... girls") and need to be loved ("one particular girl? How 'bout that Audrey?"). Twined up in this, the domineering plant begins to act as a parental figure, replacing the inadequate Mushnik. Audrey II begins life an orphan like Seymour, onto which the boy-man projects the love he did not receive, until the plant essentially enslaves him in the same way Mushnik forces Seymour to work in the shop to earn his keep (this is strengthened in the stage show via a subplot in which Mushnik legally adopts Seymour only after it becomes a lucrative proposition). In this profile shot leading up to "Feed Me", Audrey II begins a sales pitch in which it threatens and begs, works Seymour's empathy and selfishness, and thus thwarts Seymour's attempts to come out of his shell by twisting his nurturing instincts back upon him.


d) Seymour and Audrey II, through the shop's display window, watch Dr. Scrivello and Audrey. This paired profile as Orin slaps Audrey, punctuates a shot in which they enter her apartment building and exchange rhythmic dialogue while striking silhouetted poses a through a lighted window. It is not properly part of a song and dance, but functions as a loose middle eight to tie together the Audrey II/Seymour duet occurring across the street. Scrivello berates Audrey for minor perceived slights then sweeps her into the above pose and belts her across the face. Besides the abuses occurring in his dental office, this is the worst on-screen act that Dr. Scrivello commits in the film, and is impetus for Seymour's eventual murder of Scrivello via reckless endangerment. Prior two-shot profiles with Audrey and Audrey II have established this as a Seymour-centric motif, and this moment, which spurs to action a man defined by inaction, is about watching; it also intersects with several other LSOH motifs: silhouettes, shots through glass, scenes viewed from across a street, voyeuristic POV shots of characters secretly watching one another, and shots through or in front of frames -- mostly doors and windows.


e) The "Suddenly, Seymour" sequence is bookended with dual profile shots. The song cements the Audrey/Seymour romantic relationship by its final notes, but it does not begin there. Rather than a time-out declaration of love, the number contains key narrative information and character drama. As the lead-in dialogue begins, Audrey and Seymour are emotionally and visually separated. She is distant and distraught, having just learned that Orin has been killed, and Seymour is nerve-wracked and guilt-ridden over having murdered the dentist. Audrey explains that her tears are not of sorrow but relief (and, we infer, caused by no small trauma, as well as a guilty conscience over that same relief), and her confusion and confessions repeatedly cause her to pull away from comfort, look away from Seymour's sympathetic gaze. When the pain reaches its apex, and the players are at their greatest physical distance, they turn to face one another. This early verse of the song begins in the widest dual profile shot of the film. The couple tentatively expresses their feelings and Audrey lays out her backstory of personal damage, they step nearer one another and the camera pushes in on them.


f) "Suddenly, Seymour" ends by echoing the earlier wide shot, the physical distance now bridged with a lovers embrace. Triumphant as the final sustained notes of the song are, exhilarating as the rush of positive emotion seems, it is not the resolution of all troubles in Seymour's story. Rather, the declaration of devoted couplehood deepens the conflicts inherent in Seymour's other problems. The workplace romance and Seymour's increased confidence cause a panic in Mushnik, who would exploit his unadopted son's success. The vow to look after Audrey worsens Seymour's transgressions in his pact with Audrey II. Though it is not tinged with particularly pointed irony -- and the relationship, while problematic, eventually provides Seymour the inspiration to rise above -- the golden artificial sunset-kissed bliss of "Suddenly, Seymour" is an ignorant bliss.

This key sequence in the Audrey/Seymour romance contains a good deal of detail-packing beyond the scope of these notes. It does end with the couple framed before another window, this one in the half-demolished ruins of a Skid Row building. "Suddenly, Seymour" begins as the characters believe they have hit bottom, emotionally wrecked, and mulling about among the building's rubble. As they reveal their feelings, in their mutual uplift Seymour and Audrey dart up a crumbling staircase that seems to lead nowhere -- but they are indeed rising up above the ruins together. In the reverse of the above shot, the Greek chorus of Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon is perched on a ledge as heavenly chorus. The yellow sun -- last seen fully eclipsed in the backstory flashback number "Dah-Doo" (the story, thus, begins in sunlessness; the narrative opens in the vacuum of space) -- from this vantage seems to glow so warmly that it burns away the mesh (chain-link? safety-glass reenforcement?) covering the window behind Audrey and Seymour.

This double profile bursts into a comically frantic kiss the moment the characters have finished their vocal duties, which melts into the mellow ripples of afternoon light: actually a dissolve to the textured glass of Audrey's apartment building's front door. This transition is part of another visual system running through the film, one of dissolves between abstract patterns of texture and color found and revealed in mundane or unpleasant details of prop, costume and set dressing.


g) Mushnik's power games come to a head. He corners Seymour with the information that he witnessed the dismemberment of Scrivello's body, and at gunpoint insists that Seymour turn himself over to the police. In the above shot, Mushnik does an about-face, feigning sympathy to blackmail his slave/son in order to get his hands on Audrey II. Rather than taking the moral high ground, Mushnik simply believes he has the upper hand. He believes he holds the more powerful weapon (physical mass and firearm; Seymour is unarmed), the more valuable information (that Seymour murdered Orin to get to or protect Audrey; that Seymour does not know Mushnik has designs on the plant) and the greater insight into his opponent's character (he preys upon Seymour's cowardice, gentleness, meekness; Seymour holds no sympathetic sway over Mushnik). In geometric growth patterns, Mushnik's capitalist ownership increases with insatiable appetite -- he thus mirrors the destructive hunger, expansive growth and viral encroachment upon Seymour's psyche as embodied in Audrey II. Mushnik will turn to face this dark green mirror and be destroyed in a scant few screen moments, which Seymour anticipates visually and mentally. Both physically and informationally, Seymour is packing the bigger gun. In this irony-charged shot, Mushnik takes the power position, holding the center of the frame and looming over Seymour, backing the smaller man against the door.

The shot is of two men, though, and through Little Shop of Horrors, Seymour allows his mingled hollow success/doom to occur through inaction. Scrivello and Mushnik are not killed by Seymour's hand, but neither does Seymour intervene. They are destroyed by Seymour's externalized rampaging Id, in the form of Audrey II -- a point made manifest in different ways by Corman's film, the stage show and LSOH's own scrapped ending -- but also undone by their own foibles and Seymour's very meekness. LSOH positions Seymour's timidity as the central obstacle he needs to overcome. He is passive to the extreme, wallowing in socioeconomic despair on Skid Row, hoping for "someone [to] tell Lady Luck that I'm stuck here," shy around women, parental figure, customers, and thus a target for a dozen breeds of bully. This inaction is underlined as parodic parallel of Christian martyrdom and cheek-turning ethos in the number "The Meek Shall Inherit" (the aphorism given cynical twist into "the meek are gonna get what's coming to them...") The paradigm for human interaction in LSOH is one of bullying and cowering, showboats and wallflowers. Under Mushnik's threat of bullet, blackmail, losing his shot at public adoration, release from poverty, and his romance with Audrey, Seymour puts up his hands and lets the universe chomp on the bigger sinner first. Everybody gets what's coming to them, by and by.


h) The finished film allows Seymour to transform via late-game assertiveness, Audrey's affection providing his inspiration. In this profile shot, Seymour proposes marriage to Audrey and they excitedly discuss plans for elopement. As in the shot it most resembles -- (a) above -- the tableau is broken by flooding recollection of a violent personal relationship parallel to the Audrey and Seymour couple. In (a) Audrey plans to go shopping with Seymour on a borderline date, but is reminded of her abusive relationship with Orin. In (b) Seymour plans a life with Audrey but slips into ranting that there must be "no plants, I promise: no plants at all!"

Just as the prior shot marked the first evidence of Audrey and Seymour's dawning connection, and those in "Suddenly Seymour" allow them to openly express mutual feelings, this one depicts them entering a new phase. Having just caused two deaths and signed away his soul, Seymour hits bottom in the prior scene, a public meltdown at his television taping. Proposing to Audrey is certainly a progressive step, but even more proactive is Seymour's determination that they move out of town and begin a new life. Seymour's journey with Audrey II serves also as answer to his plea for "Lady Luck"'s assistance. Through dumb luck, the plant zaps through the cosmos and lands in his lap, alters his life but to no good end: Audrey II uses Seymour. In counterpoint, Seymour's transformation thanks to Audrey and learning to take control of his own life. With this profile shot, Seymour realizes he must choose between the Audreys.

An evolution to be sure, but not complete.

i) This dual profile visually quotes the staging of "Suddenly, Seymour" for a comic thwarting. "Suddenly, Seymour (Reprise)" is immediately interrupted by the sales pitch of Patrick Martin (Jim Belushi). Though brief and undercut by the disruption of Seymour's sins catching up with him, the shot and song represent the full flowering of Seymour and Audrey's romance. Having just rescued Audrey from psychic seduction and physical assault by Audrey II, Seymour's secret life is now entirely in the open. "Suddenly, Seymour" begins with Audrey's full disclosure of her dark life; the reprise is Seymour's. She accepts him despite the fears, failures and transgressions he has been concealing. Immediately after, Seymour will make his final, greatest transformation, now empowered enough to do battle with Audrey II. Seymour heads back into the shop to confront his demon and its offspring and correct his crimes. He chooses not to run or cower but solve the problems he has created. Seymour chooses responsibility and positive action. He does it because of the moments captured in these profile shots.


j) A grace note here, after Seymour has dispatched Audrey II. In some ways, the system of profile shots has been building to this moment.

After the above shot, there is only one more in the film proper, before the credit roll. The next is truly a coda, with Audrey and Seymour running away from the camera, out of Skid Row and into a suburban fantasia, and final unsettling punchline as the Greek chorus presents a small reminder of the eternal dangers of what Audrey II represents. But this, the penultimate shot of Little Shop of Horrors, closes the narrative and includes a dual profile.

In unbroken shot: Audrey cries and laughs silently, overjoyed at Seymour's emergence from the rubble of the demolished shop. Tracking left in a circle around Audrey, the shot reveals Seymour, who moves toward his proud, elated fiancée --Seymour comes to Audrey -- and the camera continues a full 360-degree track around them as the lovers embrace. The hug breaks, the tracking ceases. As Audrey and Seymour gaze at one another, the motif is invoked for just a moment, this moment. They turn and run directly into the fourth wall. Audrey runs past the camera, screen left. Seymour runs straight at the lens. The shot ends on blurry frames of Seymour's chest. It ends on his heart.

Go Boldly, or Go Home: The Vanity Mirror Universe of STAR TREK (2009)

Star Trek (2009 — hereafter Star Trek '09) contains many punchings, shootings and implodings of things. It is sort of funny and sort of dumb, which makes it par for Summer Movie Fun Zone course. The story retraces the meteoric rise of James Kirk immediately before and after — but only for three minutes during — his Starfleet Academy training, and first hours on the job as captain of the USS Enterprise. The external conflict concerns Leonard Nimoy as the Spock of 2387 attempting to stop save Romulus from its own sun going supernova. He fails and is sucked into a black hole — which somehow translates as "time warp wormhole" — with a surviving Romulan mining vessel, and upon reemergence 153 years earlier the vengeance-crazed Nero (Eric Bana, playing straight as possible) declares war on all Spocks young and old. The emotional story is about Kirk realizing his potential rather than succumbing to anger and adrenaline addiction, and Spock suffering the tortures of biracial identity issues. This may sound like rich material, and that is because it has been rich material for 40 years. Trek '09 does not actually engage these human concerns, not in the specific or abstract, but uses them to clumsily throw characters into roughly the correct location for the next action setpiece.

Director J.J. Abrams is a great TV concept man, though his most successful hour, Lost, is a straight-faced adult suspense remake of Gilligan's Island. He is a fine producer, though Lost rapidly lapsed into improperly planned idiocy, he did not touch script or camera for the excellent Cloverfield. He is, however, a terrible writer — responsible for Regarding Henry, Armageddon, Gone Fishin', etc... —and a worse director. Abrams' best directorial quality is a knack for hiring excellent actors then getting the hell out of their way. Unable to communicate in anything but big head close-ups of actors, and special effects shots which he technically did not "shoot" so much as "approve storyboards for", Abrams never needs to compose a striking, poetic, informative, or dramatic frame, because he is going to wiggle the hand-held around all over the mise-en-scène anyway. The script is not his doing, but it is entirely Abrams' fault that Trek '09 looks like a modern, boring garbagey TV show, rather than the beautiful, lurid, exciting and dreamy garbagey TV show it is based upon.

Star Trek '09 attempts an impossible, contradictory project regarding Trek Lore, desiring to reinvigorate these vigorous characters with a rousing space opera adventure and simultaneously mummify them in reverent awe, as pop culture icons whose every step inches them toward their fated seats on the bridge of the Enterprise. Neither writers nor actors know whether to play this as if we are meeting characters afresh, or if everyone is in on some colossal and unhilarious joke about destiny and remakes. The result is a lot of quite literal smirking and mugging by the cast when they do something in character... If that makes sense, which it does not.

Chris Pine captures the bravado, temper and swagger of J.T. Kirk, but not the sheer lustiness and vigor, the sweatiness and passion. He also has bad skin, is not as handsome, and does not bulge in any of the same sexy or unhealthy places as William Shatner. Pine's Kirk is less about joie de vivre than goofing around like everything is a blast all the time. This is, perhaps, not his fault, as the script gives him no opportunities for scenery chewing at a Shatnerian level, and not even much fuel for scenery licking. While the timeline disruption merely saddles Kirk with unnecessary daddy issues — his frustration with the Kobyashi Maru test are motivated by the horror that his father died in exactly the same situation, rather than the perfectly sufficient reasons built into the character as Shatner played him — this is nothing next to the reconfiguration forced on Spock.

Zachary Qunto, pasty and eyebrow-shaved, does what he can despite being miscast and having to interpret a version of Spock which removes virtually everything that makes the character Spock. If two generations of the awkward and scholastically gifted have deified Spock, it is because they admire not just the Vulcan half-breed's brains and efficient self-defense technique, but his resolute coolness, his detachment, that he comes from a math culture. Spock 2.0 is birthed by creators who do not respect or understand Vulcan itself, let alone the appeal at the heart of the character. In point of fact, the plot hinges on watching Vulcan collapse in on itself. Quinto, while certainly odd-looking, does not have the authoritative bass-baritone rumble, etched-granite skin, equine facial bones, hollow cheeks or penetrating glare of his predecessor; he is neither Other enough nor strangely beautiful as Leonard Nimoy. It may even be that Leonard Nimoy's very Jewishness informed Spock to a degree that cannot be replaced. Do-over Spock variously fumes beneath the bowl-cut over his Vulcan-ness, which is here not a metaphor for anything, or resents his human-ness; symbols of both cultures are sacrificed, forcing us to witness the appalling sight of Amanda Grayson falling in a big hole, and rendering Spock confused and with a vague identity crisis. Perhaps as ironic counterpoint, but more likely in grave misestimation, Winona Ryder gives an emotionally thin and otherworldly performance as Spock's human mom, while Ben Cross is more recognizably human as Sarek. The brilliance of Nimoy's original has always been that Spock, raised Vulcan and icy, has always had emotions, but no equipment for expressing them. In Trek '09, he has always been a mess (better not to delve into an out-of-nowheres smoochy relationship with Uhura, which must be surely break Starfleet regulations, and be singularly unsatisfying for the lady in red, and replaces the more interesting sight of Nurse Chapel pining for Spock). The very story of Spock is of a being put in touch with his humanity through prolonged contact and friendships on the Enterprise and with Kirk in specific. For a film purportedly about Kirk and Spock's dynamic, this imbalance is disastrous. Spock unequipped to deal with emotional turmoil + Kirk's lust for life = the formula the birthed the very notion of slash fiction. This has always been the pulse of this relationship, and Trek '09 makes hash of it.

Trek '09 is not about much of anything but itself and maybe the very idea of Trek Mythos. Some not-sense about people from the future impacting the way the Enterprise crew started hanging out and an old (well, future) enemy seeking straightforward revenge via convoluted plan is the kind of imagination-retarded story you might invent while playing with your Mego action figures. It is a huge mistake on the screenwriters' part to think the Wrath of Khan plot is hotswappable with a kiddie-Trek story. The recycling (thievery, if you prefer) renders the resonances of Khan moot, is one of the reasons the story doesn't work or feel like it makes "sense" (not to mention: they got paid for that?). It is symptomatic of the screenwriters only sort-of getting it. Because Khan's is partly a story about the end of Kirk's youthful derring-do, and career-long struggle with the Prime Directive. It is a story of the headstrong, boldly-going youth's bad decisions catching up with him in middle-age.

Trek '09 tries to graft the decade-spanning revenge and aging story onto an origin story. The result is a movie about young adult Spock forced to deal with a villain who wants to make Spock pay for perceived sins he will not commit for more than a century and a half... an error which is not even really Spock's fault.

In a very funny list posted to Mobius Home Video Forum, Lenny Moore outlined extremely basic hard-science problems at the root of the plot, not the least of which is how Spock and Nero's crew survive being sucked into a black hole, or exactly what Romulus is supposed to do with no sun and a matter-vacuum directly adjacent to its atmosphere. As above, problematic too is the crucial emotional-truth logic of how characters are behaving at any given time. Nothing in Trek '09 makes any goddamn sense. This is because it is, again, sort of dumb and weird as well. For some (waffling, sucking-up, ass-covering) reason, this re-whatevering of Trek does not simply jettison all previous continuity, as in, say the Ultimate Marvel comics line. It not only does not refuse to start over and let everyone in the audience deal with their own hang-ups about this, Star Trek '09 devotes its entire running time to explaining why it is not Star Trek starring Messers Shatner and Nimoy and the ship's bridge looks like a very clean public restroom rather than a rec room, and the phasers look like cheap plastic squirt guns instead of bad-ass squirt guns. This is not ten minutes of applied phlebotinum, but the entire story. The baffling result is that the movie has no story of its own and spends two hours justifying its own existence.

The Trek notion of time-travel has always been inconsistent, but nowhere in Star Trek '09 is it obvious or logical that Star Trek '66 still exists. The new film doesn't "branch off" the timeline so far as I can tell, but supersede the Original Series... and therefore Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space 9. Don't worry about Enterprise, because I guess it wouldn't fall in the black hole, and already had continuity issues of its own. There is a vast amount of horrible Star Trek already, so under lab conditions I do not care a whit for dogged faithfulness to a continuity that does not serve the needs of storytelling. But Trek '09's A Story is preoccupied with little else but series continuity. This is the Star Trek equivalent of Crisis on Infinite Earths. As such, it begs for exactly the kind of scrutiny the screenwriters have presumably been tasked by Paramount to alleviate. And, as with all else, it is highly illogical at best.

Indeed, as the faithful yelped after seeing the trailer, James Kirk Prime cannot drive a 20th Century motor vehicle, as seen in "A Piece of the Action". But no matter: Black Hole Universe Kirk picked up the skill. You may or may not buy this, but after the temporal anomaly, any and every detail may be chalked up to The Hole. But!:

Events which occur in Trek continuity before the timeline alteration are violated before the Trek '09 plot patch-in even occurs: Jim Kirk's older brother Sam is a no-show, the Kelvin is able to identify a Romulan ship and nothing is made of how historic the encounter is, despite Kirk's clear question in the episode "Balance of Terror": "After a whole century, what would a Romulan ship look like...?"... or after 60 years, for that matter? Spock, McCoy and Scott's (pre-temporal anomaly) birthdays have been left nebulous, therefore presumably unchanged (and, [hand-wave] they look a good deal younger, though the actors are roughly the correct age, save Karl Urban as McCoy, who is ten years shy of DeForest Kelly at the inception of his five-year mission). Perhaps their personal histories since birth have been altered since the timeline anomaly, yet it causes all three men to enter Starfleet service at grossly late dates in life. This "altered" timeline seems awfully preoccupied with making sure all of the Enterprise crew is either the same age, or goes through Academy together, and all end up on the bridge faster than the first go-round (in Original Series continuity, Sulu started as a physicist and Chekov didn't make navigator until second season). The timeline also seems to have it in for Dr. Piper and Gary Mitchell, who must have been inspired to seek other paths in life, but exceptionally kind to Capt. Christopher Pike. And too, the very nature, meaning and depiction of what it means to be Vulcan is altered in ways that cannot be chalked up to temporal anomaly.

At the end, Spock Prime is trapped in this Hell dimension, where Vulcan has been Alderaan'ed, no one knows who he is, and all his friends are turned into smirking babies. Note: this potentially nightmarish s-f idea is not actually explored in the movie. Because no "ideas" are explored in the movie.

Putting myriad other shortcomings aside (if possible?), this is where Trek '09 fails to be Star Trek. Since the end of Original Series, Trek Universe turned into the dreariest of places, more fun to think about than to visit. Star Trek was colorful and shooty and goofy, sexy and boozy, and peoples' shirts got torn all the time because they were wrassling each other on piles of foam rocks. The first episode is about how McCoy has to metaphorically shoot his ex-girlfriend because she turned into a succubus. But it was also sincere and authentic speculative fiction. It waddled the line between hard and soft s-f. There are weaponized ship battles, and a space-Western spirit of adventure, but most every Original Series story is centered on some brainy classic s-f thought experiment, serious social, political or religious allegory, philosophical conundrum or, in purest form, asked seriously: what if?

Fine enough. Screenwriters Orci and Kurtzman never ask What If?, only ask How did they get on that spaceship? They got the action and adventure relatively right, but that is only part of the Star Trek spirit. Taking someone else's toys and playing with them in semi-clever, very loud and enjoyable way may be what these fellows do best, anyhow. In 2007 they wrote a better script for a movie about the Transformers than a sane person could reasonably expect (similarly sabotoged by a director's refusal to learn how to impart a sense of geography to any scene, be it epic robot battle or simple dialogue exchange). The plotting is lazy as well, hinging every joint on sheer coincidence — often triple-hinging on coincidence — but in a multiplex Space-Shot-ride film, this is not remarkable; excusable but not admirable. To their credit, the writers think of many thrilling and breathless things to do with the transporter room, Sulu's swordfighting skills, and invent brutal ways to smoke Redshirts. It also copiously steals from Star Wars pictures, including duplicating that part with the fish monsters from The Phantom Menace. While it may provide some nihilistic charge to proving that in this do-over Trek anything truly goes, making Spock part of a dying culture is neither as useful or fun as being able to visit Vulcan in future installments.

Oh, and the script hits several Trek tropes and in-jokes that made people in my theater chortle. I am nerdy enough that I think I "got" them, but not nerdy enough to pretend they were funny or that it was any kind of thrill to find out what happened to Jonathan Archer's dog.

Star Trek '09 plays like a Holodeck simulation of Star Trek '66. Fun while you're inside, harmless by design, but it dissolves before your eyes, insubstantial. Simulation over.

Astounding DVD Covers!

When it comes to DVD covers, nearly every release from a major studio recycles the boring theatrical poster or contains a digital hack job even worse than the hack job that was the original poster. These can be shocking as eyesores, and particularly confusing as "real" companies have entire dedicated art and design departments, and large amounts of capital are involved in preparing their releases. And everyone enjoys that shuddery feeling of delight when a large company wastes vast sums on a hideous-looking product.
But the movies inside are normal. Sometimes they are even good!

Once in awhile the Special Ones toddle out of their caves, closets and forgotten crypts. Things that are technically DVDs and technically have covers, but even knowing this, the eyes and mind resist: it cannot exist. And yet they do, even though you do not know what they are, not really. Many of these lovelies are only alive through the mercy of DVD-on-demand D.I.Y. services, which then list the hapless home-movie auteur's projects in a public catalog. Others come to us as if silver-disc spacecraft dispatched from the galaxy of Public Domain Fly-by Night DVD Labels. Some arrive on steamships from exotic lands. These are not run-of-the-mill bad DVD covers (NOTE: DVD covers are not made in mills). They make you feel weird. Stunned. Wondering. Astounded by...

Astounding DVD Covers! #1: Catch of the Day!