The thing I love about the public library system of Chesapeake, VA is that, while libraries across the nation will do anything in their power to keep kids from reading “Catcher in the Rye,” “Harry Potter,” or whatever scapegoat is popular at the time, Chesapeake continues to generously allow its Central Library as a venue for Fantasmo Cult Cinema Explosion, a regular event showcasing historic genre classics, often with a hard R designation. For its eleventh installment on February 3, 2006, Fantasmo is spotlighting John Carpenter with screenings of “The Fog” and “They Live.”
How are you qualified to speak with any authority about John Carpenter? Well, I wrote a scholarly monograph in the year 2000 called The Films of John Carpenter, that - in detail - analyzes the filmed works of the director. My analysis in the book is based on my knowledge of film history, my education in film theory, and my own experience writing, editing and directing "z grade" movies. the latter is surprisingly helpful when considering editing, composition, etc. But let me be clear - I analyze Carpenter's films based on my reading and understanding of film grammar; and by viewing of the film as individual "texts." I look for commonalities - both visual and thematic, an umbrella of unity - within the director's canon. But I don't personally know John Carpenter, and my conclusions are entirely my own. John Carpenter has been described, I believe by himself, as an old fashioned craftsman who looks up to directors such as Howard Hawks and John Ford. Though Carpenter is an immensely skilled director in his own right and has clearly learned more from these giants than most modern filmmakers, his own career has been spent mostly in the marginalized genres of science fiction and horror, not approaching the range and broad popular appeal of a Hawks or a Ford. To what do you attribute this? Irreconcilable differences in Hollywood eras? Carpenter’s own dispositions or limitations? Carpenter has also cultivated a reputation as something of a maverick, whose films are often full of sly, subversive content and anti-social heroes. How does this element compare to the films of Ford or Hawks? I don't believe horror and science fiction were marginalized in the late 1970s and 1980s. By contrast, the Western film (one of Hawks' genres; certainly Ford's) was pretty clearly marginalized during the Reagan era, with only a few representatives like Silverado and the like. Sci-fi and horror were - during Carpenter's career - not marginalized at all, but rather perched atop the box office heap. Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounter, Jaws, Poltergeist, Back to the Future, Gremlins, Aliens, Predator...these were all very successful films. So Carpenter was working in the field that was - and is even more so today - very popular. He probably would have preferred to make Westerns; but there was little demand. In a sense, it's like comparing apples and oranges. It's just like you said "irreconciliable differences in Hollywood eras." Many of Hawks' and Ford's early work didn't have to compete with television. So they necessarily boasted a broader audience. By the time Carpenter emerged in the late-1970s as a "master of suspense," TV was fully entrenched in the culture. Movies and television were in direct competition, and the movie audience was smaller than it had been in the 1950s. Carpenter has had a long career directing films ranging (this is me listing and subjectively categorizing the ones I’ve seen) from early classics such as the original “Assault on Precinct 13,” “Halloween,” and the remake of “The Thing,” cult favorites like “The Fog,” “Escape from New York,” and “Big Trouble in Little China,” massively entertaining and under-rated genre movies “Escape from L.A.,” “Vampires,” and “Ghosts of Mars,” and terrible clunkers such as “Memoirs of an Invisible Man.” Where do you agree and disagree with these perceptions, what films that I have not mentioned/seen are interesting or essential to Carpenter’s filmography, and where do you think “They Live” belongs in this canon? Well, you're pretty much on the money there. I think an argument can be made for the quality of "Assault on Precinct 13," "Halloween," "The Fog," "The Thing," "Starman," "Big Trouble in Little China," "Prince of Darkness" and "They Live." To me, each and every one of those films has something incredible going on, thematically and visually. And each one works well within the genre where it was intended to work. I happen to love "Ghosts of Mars" and see it as another siege film in the spirit of Assault on Precinct 13 or Prince of Darkness. Remember, Hawks re-made Rio Bravo twice; and now Carpenter has re-made Assault on Precinct 13 twice, with minor variations. I also think that critics completely missed the boat on "Escape from L.A." It's a canny, political satire masquerading as an action-fantasy film. I think it's terrific, and highly underrated. Today, it looks absolutely prophetic, with its depiction of an evangelical Christian in the White House. I also appreciate "In the Mouth of Madness" a great deal. And I love the siege on the master vampire homestead near the opening of "Vampires." "Christine" is a fine film, but there's not much of Carpenter's personality in it; at least not enough for my taste. Which of Carpenter's films do I genuinely dislike? "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" and the "Village of the Damned" remake leap to mind. Carpenter’s adequate score for “They Live” is bluesy and generic. How does it compare to his more synthetic and memorable scores to his earlier works? I love the score. I hum it all the time. Especially when I'm crossing railroad tracks and wearing flannel shirts... “They Live” was made for Universal, once famous for being the house of all the seminal movie monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man et al.) “They Live,” a Universal production by a more modern horror master, opens with realistic location shots of graffiti-strewn urban grit and train tracks, much different from the stylized gothic settings utilized by directors such as James Whale and Tod Browning in the classic monster cycle of the forties. How did Universal genre films (and horror/action/sci-fi) change so drastically in forty years? The short answer is this: there was a paradigm shift in movies during the 1960s. This is why movie musicals suddenly failed very badly at the box office after being a very popular genre for decades. Movies originally came out of a theatrical (meaning stage) tradition. This means dramatic, theatrical-type performances, and theatrical scripting and staging. It's all very, very unrealistic and hyper-melodramatic. By the 1960s (and again, the advent of television), the paradigm had shifted to a much more naturalistic one. We want more reality out of our movies all the time. Everything on screen must seem natural and true, and authentic, even gritty. So the movies went from being very stagey and artificial (in the era of the great Universal Monster Classics), to very natural or real in the age of Carpenter. That's the reason for the changes in approach: audiences demanded that the movies reflect their desire for more realism. This is why the characters in say, the 1974 "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" are drawn in such different terms than in, say, the 1946 early serial killer drama, "The Spiral Staircase". That disheveled anti-hero is none other than Rowdy Roddy Piper of former World Wrestling Federation fame! What ever became of Mr. Piper after being the star of this major studio production? Was the world not ready for a professional wrestler/leading man who was not doing a Hoganesque self-parody? Would Mr. Piper have fared better 15 years later, when Dwayne Johnson, the Rock, found success as a movie star? Those are good questions. I don't know what Mr. Piper is up to these days, but certainly featuring a wrestling interlude in They Live was a pioneering thing to do. You pointed out yourself the popularity of The Rock today. How does Rowdy Roddy’s rugged individualist stack up next to Carpenter’s other alpha males played by such supermen as Kurt Russell and Ice Cube? Well, I don't think that John Nada radiates the intelligence of MacReady or Cube's character. Which I think doesn't necessarily do "They Live" any favors. He's a thick neck, really, but one with a good, strong heart and - like many a cowboy - an unerring sense of right and wrong. Piper is fine in the film; but - my personal opinion here - I would have preferred Kurt Russell. Piper’s character sports the once-popular hairstyle that was once popularly derided as a “mullet.” In some of your own publicity shots, your hair does happen to be longer in the back than in the front. Do you feel that when it was a hip phenomenon to gawk at and mock these hairstyles all out of proportion, this was a thinly veiled expression of elitist classism? I don't know. Styles change every decade or so. Long hair is popular for a while and then it's not. We can all look back and recognize a "70s" fashion or an "80s" fashion. It's fun to laugh at, but we should remember, those styles were popular once. I try to buck the trend by growing my hair really, really long, then cutting it really, really short, and then people can't figure out when my picture was taken... The opening sequence of “They Live” moves from a grimy train yard to a dismal cityscape with people using cardboard boxes to shelter themselves from the rain to an employment center (populated by at least one man in a wheelchair missing a leg) coldly offering no jobs. Piper’s character claims to have worked in Denver for ten years before things “just dried up.” He spends the night in a makeshift homeless colony. Is Carpenter merely creating an underdog milieu for our hero, or planting the film firmly in a shadow version of Reagan’s America? This is Reagan's America, no doubt about it. Carpenter has said as much in interviews. By 1983 - just two years, essentially, into Reagan's term - there were five million more people living in poverty than when he took office, up to a staggering 35 million in the U.S. And remember, this is the President who made comments like "some people are homeless by choice." The 1980s is known as the "greed" decade for good reason. The gap between the very rich and the very poor increased dramatically. All of that is the backdrop for They Live. A preacher in a public park introduces us to the titular “They,” who have “taken the hearts and minds of our leaders” and “blinded us to the truth,” making us worship greed, owning and controlling us. Cut to several television monitors. Have all of the themes of the film just been spelled out in two minutes? Well, that's it in a nutshell, I guess. But as the film goes on, Carpenter expands the point to a message about conservative control of popular culture (by lampooning Siskel and Ebert and their objections to Romero films), and then he extends the metaphor to Presidential Elections (a news clip shows an "alien" candidate commenting on morning in America, or thereabouts). Also, late in the film, there's a turncoat among the rebels, and this is the point where Carpenter gets to make his point about "selling out" and how easy it is. All of that stuff is important to a reading of the film, I think. No more than seven minutes into the film we are treated to an abundance of shirtless, muscular men laboring photogenic before Piper and Keith David initiate a relationship that is mutually hard-to-get flirtatious. Why was there so much homoeroticism in the popular cinema of the eighties? This is actually a change in our perception more than any gay message. In old Western movies (like Rio Bravo), you'll find precisely the same sort of relationship between Dean Martin and John Wayne. It was a playful banter; showing a respect and love between "brothers." You see that dynamic in many Carpenter films, including Vampires and Assault on Precinct 13. Again, Carpenter is evoking Hawksian character-types. Today, gay culture is so politicized and feared that everybody reads affection among men as gay. David, another refugee of economic depression, delivers an anti-corparate, pro-worker spiel that seems to bravely border on Marxist for a Hollywood movie. Gazing at an emblematic skyline, Piper is more patient, still harboring a belief in America. How unusual was such overt political content for the films of Carpenter and mainstream film in general at the time? This was very unusual. Political messages were getting out in some movies during this time, thanks to artists like Wes Craven and John Carpenter, but almost universally in a setting that could easily be dismissed by critics, like "a horror movie." Somehow, they're easier for mainstreamers to write off that way...
J.K. Muir's film/TV blog: reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com |