“I’ll only be here twenty-four hours.”

“In a place Like this that could last a life-time. “

It seems like a good time to talk about John Sturges’s 1955 genre hybrid Bad Day at Black Rock, since it’s going to be playing in a new print at Film Forum for the next week or so.   Shot in beautiful Cinemascope by the perpetually underrated Sturges, who would mark American film not only through classics like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape but equally fascinating films like Ice Station Zebra and Joe Kidd, with a screenplay by blacklisted writer Millard Kaufman that stands out as much as a dissenting voice in Cold War America as Clouzot’s Le Corbeau did in occupied France.

2.

The plot of the film – which was most likely spoiled half a century ago, though here’s a warning right now – starts with black-hatted, one-handed veteran Spencer Tracy stepping off the steam train and into the town of Black Rock, where no one has disembarked in four years.  He’s looking for his friend, and Japanese farmed named Komoko who lived out at Adobe Flats, and gets nothing but distrust from the townsfolk.  He gets to the bottom of it, gently poking away at the guilt residing in this decaying town, even through threat of death.  He finds that Komoko was murdered, burned to death and shot; Tracy, who only wanted to visit the father of a war buddy before leaving the living world for a drunken “retirement,” finds himself turned into an instrument of righteousness. By the end of the film the whole town, nearly, is arrested or dead; Komoko’s killer is burned alive. Tracy gets back on the train.

“I believe a man’s as big as what he’s seen.”

We never see Komoko’s murder, never see Komoko’s son die trying to save Tracy’s life, never see Tracy lose his hand in the war. All are explained, simply through dialogue, and a shot of wild flowers growing over what is probably Komoko’s grave.  The killer, or rather the man who had the most to do with enabling this murder, is burned alive in front of us, and that sight rhymes, just a little bit, with that which we have not seen, and we may think, “maybe that’s what it was like, after all.” This is, after all, a film about evil buried in the collective memory, which nonetheless contains not a single flashback.  It doesn’t much need to – the entire style, the decaying Western town with train tracks and telegraph wires, sitting in the middle of a country that was going through the largest economic boom of the century, is already at war with the present. It’s been stunted; there is,  as they say, poison in the well, a metaphor made literal throughout the film – the town of Black Rock has no water, Kokomo dug deep enough and found it, and his well lies unused on the place of his murder.

4.

Whether or not to read the film as a state of the union allegory about the country in ’55 is almost beside the point – Western iconography is so intimately tied to the iconography of America as a country that it would almost impossible to make a film in the genre which did not resonate as such – especially since our historical understanding of the moment is so assaulted by the concerns of the present.  The skies of the town are so blue, the Western backdrops so perfect, that they look almost artificial; the sound-stage backdrops used for the views in interiors seem more “natural.” The sort of we imagine might be found in 1950s America, but by then already starting to disappear. As of this writing, you can get on a train from mid-town Manhattan, and after an hour’s travel upstate arrive at the kind of view that the Hudson River School might have  sketched centuries ago.  That kind of vertigo, the look back into a crumbling past that seems transparently there is an inextricable part of the Western genre, even as that genre itself started to disappear, as the locations moved bit by bit overseas, to the deserts of Spain.   The specificity of the plot may be directly from the film’s year, but the plot is timeless; the man in black could be Melmoth, could be Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus. Within a few years he would be Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen.  Sturges would work with Eastwood years later, on the fascinating, Elmore Leonard written Joe Kidd,  which – despite being set squarely within the classic Western era -  seems more modern, less Classic in its setting. The past there has grown even further away.

The Way Some People Die

The one thing — Black Rock ends in an ostensibly optimistic fashion, with Tracy handing the medal to the poor old drunken Doctor/Mortician/Vet, Tracy getting on the train, perfectly mirroring the opening.  We know that he never meant to be stuck in a life or death moral struggle — this trip was merely supposed to be a quick stop, to drop off the medal and leave. His suitcase is packed with several pairs of clothing, and a bottle of liquor; after the medal was passed off, he planned to disappear off the face of the map.   So where does he go? Are we to believe that this experience has changed him, in some fundamental way, that the planned trajectory of his life is going to change? Or just travel through the world, liquor in hand, like a specter, righting wrongs?  If this phantom series ever got made, then what would it look like, four movies down the line? Tracy, one hand, black suit, even older than before, departs at, what port? Bangkok? It’s gotten slower, emptier, the framings wider, more artificial. No music anymore. no women, none of the supporting cast survives.  Maybe there will be a brothel. How many films could it go for? At what point would he rest? And when he died, what would it have looked like?

Charles Bronson! Toshiro Mifune! Alain Delon! Red Sun!

The greatest tragedy of this film is that it never manages to rise to the promise of pairing these three actors together, especially under the direction of Terence Young, an interesting and versatile director whose career most notably peaked with creating, in Dr. No and From Russia With Love, the two most interesting films in the James Bond franchise.  Not a disaster by any means, the film never seems to stick, and though it remains an interesting viewing experience it is nonetheless most interesting to discuss in terms of the film that exists in the imagination, rather than the one we have on screen.

2.

The plot, which starts with a train robbery and ends in a confrontation with Indians, is fairly perfunctory, a machine built of the standard gears that seeks to elicit interest entirely through use of its unorthodox characters. For nearly 40 minutes of the first hour we watch Mifune and Bronson bicker in the desert, a kind of low-energy take on John Boorman’s far superior Hell in the Pacific (in which Mifune is teemed with Lee Marvin on an island during the second world war) which could have approached Beckett or at least 1960s Monte Hellman but instead plays like a romantic comedy, with the bickering couple learning to love each other in the end, just in time to fight Delon, here playing Bronson’s hated ex. The emptiness of the desert setting – classic Italian – pushes the performances to the forefront, and the whole thing occasionally feels like watching an adolescent playing with his dolls – Cowboy! Samurai! – in a sandbox.

3.

The performers are in this case cast along strict national lines and, disappointingly, adhere to them. Mifune gets cast as the unfailingly stoic, honorable Samurai; Bronson as the affable but tough American Cowboy; Deloin gets to be the sadistic, black clad dandy (named Gauche, of course). Which is a shame, considering that all three performers made their names in complex roles  that blend iconography aesthetics in often perverse ways.  To imagine the Delon of Le Samurai interacting with the Bronson of Once Upon a Time in the West and the Mifune of Yojimbo (the film that proved the basis for Leone’s Man with no Name trilogy, for which he initially wanted to cast Bronson in the role made famous by Eastwood) is to imagine a much stranger, much more interesting film.

4.

Increasingly it feels like we live in a world of film that is starved for icons.  Think of Belmondo imitating Bogart in About de Souffle – that gesture, flattening out his lips to resemble his hero’s legendary face, goes beyond something as simple as hero worship or celebrity obsession and into another realm altogether. A great author, a Proust or Beckett, can in a single sentence evoke not only a world but a mode of framing and interacting with the world, and a truly great performer, like any of these three men, can do the same. Just like a young man can fall to his death by basing his ideal universe around the set of Bogart’s lips, so could you construct an entire aesthetics of masculinity in the way Charles Bronson squints at the sun, or the way Delon wears a pin-striped suit and hat. This may not be a healthy way to live – Belmondo dies tragically, we can’t forget that – but it is, perhaps, an inevitable one in the world we live in today.

5.

All these aesthetics we attribute to these actors are of course tied, very specifically, to a few directors. Jean-Pierre Melville, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone (and arguably Don Siegel). But their hands touch these performers, and their vision carries on within them.  Watch Losey’s disastrous Assasination of Trotsky, and you can see Melville hovering just a bit, like  a ghost or an aerosol emission, behind Delon in the distance. Serge Daney, not long before his death, had a dream of John Wayne standing at the North Pole, and Joao Cesar Monteiro would make a film with that image at its heart; Monteiro, so thin he could joke about having a tape worm and you would just about believe him,  starred in his final film as he was dying of cancer, just like John Wayne did.  The curtains of the twentieth century closed about a decade ago, and the men and women who walked through it as icons seem almost as distant as the apostles.

6.

As a personal confession: I will watch any film that combines Western iconography and happens to include a scene in a brothel. There is a great such sequence in this film , right in the center; the two men, having spent days in the desert, track down Delon’s mistress (Ursula Andress!) in a brothel where she works.  Bronson seems familiar there, and in fact seems to have something of a relationship with the Madame. Even Mifune gets a girl, a young Mexican (read: Italian) girl who notes that their skin color is almost the same; he has a long bath. They leave the brothel soon, of course, on route to the honorable violence of the conclusion, which leaves both Delon and Mifune dead, the MacGuffin (a ceremonial sword on route to the President in Washington) recovered. But you can imagine a different ending, easily enough. The two men, Bronson and Mifune, feel so comfortable there, in the brothel, that they never leave, forgetting their vendettas, forgetting their mission. Delon sends men to kill them, but it never works, and they use the bounty on the hired killers to pay for their stay (the brothel keeps them as security). Eventually the turn to drink, drugs, and days go by in a haze. One night Mifune will wake up, in a cold sweat, and remember the Japan of his youth, the dying honor of the family he left behind.  A town will be built around them; when they leave, to visit what remains of their family and friends, they will find the twentieth century is already underway, the landscape they remember all but gone. Mifune, an old man, will return to Japan and find men and women wearing Western suits and hats; talk of war will be in the air. His Japanese by now will be accented with a cowboy drawl, and in his ten gallon hat he will be the talk of the town. The meaning of that golden sword will be forgotten by all; there wasn’t even a photograph taken to etch it in memory, all the pity.

About ten years back, I would have been thirteen or so, still in boy scouts. We were off on a weeklong camping trip to Sabbatis County, a cut of Adirondack territory that whistled in the morning and hummed at night, water was clean, air was fresh. This was the same camping trip in which I pissed in the woods and a bear walked about twenty feet away from me, the bastard so full of whatever he’d swiped from other terrified campers (over whom I had the considerable advantage of having already been pissing when I saw him) that he mercifully took no interest in my rapidly retracting pecker.

I had recently been reintroduced to Robert Crumb’s work, and for the first time to Gary Panter, Daniel Clowes and probably Art Spiegelman, several of whom (most notably Panter) I still shamelessly lift ideas from today. I was at that insufferable crossroads of losing a salient patience with superhero comics (which I read then and continue to read today in secret), ready to move forward into deeper, darker waters. I had to take artistic qualifiers like “awesome” and “looks so cool” out of my vocabulary and replace them with talk of spacial activation, personal symbolism and allegory, which were quite as obnoxious then as they are now. I would apply these terms to all sorts of hard-working, deserving figures, like the much maligned Jhonen Vasquez (who is a much better artist than you remember him being, and JTHM, grating in the extreme as an agent of marketing, stands as an interesting and mostly well executed portrait of a young artist from a largely underepresented culture learning how to make comics). I was beginning to see that Picasso was in fact not even a little bit boring, that Redwall and Harry Potter were certainly not the best (or only) books ever written, and that mainstream comics were predictable, formulaic and only for the low of mind, words I’ve since been forced to eat. However, at that point, voice dropping and mind (ostensibly) swelling, I firmly stood my ground and swore off the mainstream, guaranteeing the lack of success and marketability I enjoy to this very day.

But at that point, I had Nathan’s copies of Just a Pilgrim. I loved Preacher, Hitman and Hellblazer, more for the still considerable levels of perversity and gore in their pages than for their larger themes and structure, which flew well over my vastly inflated head. Pilgrim was not the best book Garth Ennis ever wrote (That would be a tie between the aforementioned Hitman, Preacher and the first 20 issues of the Marvel Knights Punisher). This ain’t a post about Garth Ennis (that will come later). This is a post about Carlos Ezquerra. In issue two of Pilgrim, one of the most jarring and memorable images committed to modern comics swung a mallet into my cherubic face.

Carlos Ezquerra was born in Zaragoza, the Kingdom of Aragon, Spain, in 1947. This places him in his late thirties or early forties when he hit his stride on Judge Dredd, in his fifties on the Hitman annual and pushing sixty on Pilgrim. The broader scope of comics dictates that upon hitting the half-century mark, most artists “slow down” and begin to produce more technical and quiet work, as we’ve seen from Mazuchelli, Clowes, Crumb, Campbell, Panter, Moebius, Moore, etc. This is fine and dandy for one strain of cartoonist, but Ezquerra, if possible, only went crazier. His early work owes an obvious debt to Moebius, like so many of his fellow 2000 A.D artists at the time. With that said, his page composition, sense of pacing and scale, as well as the bare-bones markmaking execution of his work, especially in black and white, was second to none back in the seventies and eighties.

It’s funny, when I was younger, comics were very infrequently spoken of in terms their rules and regulations insofar as the illusion of motion in driving a narrative is concerned. Maybe that’s just my generation, more wrapped up in Jim Lee than Jim Woodring. We had our Scott McCloud, who is a very nice man if you ever get to meet him. We had people like him telling us to look at Will Eisner, who told us to look at the movies. It’s an old artist thing, and it’s obviously valid. It bothers me that amongst some of these older guys (most of whom can draw rings around you, me and everyone we’ll ever meet) speak about comics as a retarded offshoot of film, implying that only by understanding film vocabulary can one be a good artist. I’m in two camps about that one, as I think an artist who understands the languages spoken in different mediums is probably going to be a superior artist to one who focuses on only one form of expression. I’m also dead sick of  comics being treated like (or made exclusively to cater to) film. It ain’t fair. But, with that said, Ezquerra falls into the old camp. He talks about watching a lot of film to study composition, the ways people move, images that work and don’t work, etc. But, again forcing me to eat my belligerent words, Ezquerra’s work is so utterly unique to comics that there’s plainly a lot to be learned from his ways.

Rounded Borders

He doesn’t always use them, but it’s a very interesting method of storytelling, and one that’s much more subtle than his draughstmanship would lead one to believe he’s capable of. He plainly suspends panel borders altogether in the interest of sending the action sailing from one moment to the next. If we’re going to speak McCloudian, most of the transitions in the above pages are moment-to-moment, aspect-to-aspect leaps across a static field. I tend to think that Ezquerra understands better than many of his contemporaries the importance of page activation through more than pedantic detailing (though he fell prey to that as well when he was young). The second page from the bottom, first words “NUMBER 4 CARTRIDGE!” is as well composed a page of action comics as we’re ever likely to see. It strikes me as partly late-period Ditko (which would, now that I think of it, be roughly contemporaneous with this comic) and, call me crazy, but I see some Carl Barks in there, as well as Don Rosa and Walt Kelly. These artists are the go-to guys for cartoonist a little older than Ezquerra, so it’s almost undoubtable that he would have seen them. Barks in particular subtly composed his page to both swell around and emanate from a chosen center. Even his transitions of a character running in one direction in one panel, and in the second panel, to continue the same run but apparently be moving in the opposite direction, was a sharp (and fairly difficult) artistic choice to keep the pace and pulse of a story intact throughout. Barks was obviously working on comics with a softer, younger reader base than Ezquerra, but these things ARE connected.

The rounded panel borders work in a variety of ways. Firstly, they do away with the abrupt angularity of a “classic” comic book panel transition. They lend speed and urgency to the panel, but in an incredibly subtle way. As readers, we generally just see the subject matter. For my part, I read these things two ways, and often read them twice: First as a kid reading a comic, loving the story and the art and not wanting it to end. Then once more, critical faculties intact, barely even reading it, more like performing an autopsy and an investigation into possible suspects and motives (if suspects and motives were artistic tricks for me to steal and use in my own work without crediting anyone). To think about it another way, everyone’s seen either the oldest Superman comics or the Max Fleischer cartoon at least once. When they say “More powerful than a locomotive!”, do they show a stalled, angular train with a plume of smoke pouring straight into the sky? Hell no they don’t, they show that train barreling forward, curved at its most vertiginous points, giving the sense of speed and power as invisible forces surge forward from the horizontal and vertical centers. The same principle applies here. The way these visual cues affect our reading of comics are subtle, but being aware of how this vocabulary works seems very important to me.

Two halves of a circle

When you’re working on a straight grid in comics, as in the topmost page and the one below it, you have to challenge yourself to make that grid swell and contract like the living, breathing entity it is. Ezquerra uses a lot of subtle tricks to do this, including composing everything on the top tier as a half-circle, throwing a compositional line through the middle (never forget, even in something like Archie, without something to direct our vision it’s really easy to get lost on a comics page) and the lower half of the circle below. On the top most page, if one wanted to print it out, they could draw a single curve through every point of interest on the higher tier of the page, angle across through the little guy in black cleaning his gun (important!), through the black logo (important!) and to the face of the kid on the lower half of the page, which is shaded and darker than what’s around him (IMPORTANT!). The trick of guys like Ezquerra, as well as Von Eeden, now that I think of it, is to have drawn so many damn comics that the most important visual choices become so obvious as to appear arbitrary. They could not be further from arbitrary, but the way Ezquerra guides our eye using little more than negative space and fields of black (which, without the contour line drawings, could probably still serve as a fairly cogent story) is the work of a seasoned professional who knows every tool he uses like it’s his own reflection, and I doubt even little old Alex Toth would have anything to horrid to say about this comic, unlike poor Steve Rude’s.

Fuck the Panel Borders comin’ straight from the underground

I’ve been working on comics in sketchbooks lately, one or two panels a page, and the limits definitely do me a lot of favors. I’ve also been obsessed with comics from the 70s and 80s, so the idea of doing away with panel borders entirely is one that I’m keen to experiment with some more. The last two pages above are a great demonstration of this uniquely two-decades-past approach to treating the page as a grenade. It’s not the green bumpy part of the grenade that’s dangerous, it’s the explosion that comes when the green bumpy part is gone. The second page from the bottom is an incredible distillation of everything I’ve already said about Ezquerra. The way the panel borders disappear as the battle begins is no accident of any kind. It’s a canny, subtle comics trick that, when used properly, is as heart-stopping and awe-inspiring as any battle scene in film (except maybe the end of The Killers). The composition travels down the barrel of the gun, the helmet ripple-mimics the curve of the motorcyle, the body motion and even the emanata in the panel above, the gun barrel rips into the last whole panel on the page, the lines of the shouting man lead right to the four guys firing the guns, who make a downward-facing parabola which is echoed in the drawing beneath… This is a fucking gorgeous page.

The page beneath it is almost too Moebius to even discuss as an Ezquerra page, but we soldier on. Follow the solid blacks, remembering that the logo is as active an element of the page as any of the figures. Follow the thinner, sparer lines across the page, from figures to face to bizarre analytical corridor with dinosaur man. Notice those curved panel borders again, and the angled caption box bowing towards the curve in the upper right corner (and simultaneously leading the eye down to the next caption). The articulacy of his line, which is one of the most agile and underrated in comics, separating with ease each texture from every other.

One of my biggest problems with Pilgrim is the coloring. That ugly, flat computer coloring, where everything looks so brown and dull. Unless you were strapped for time (they were not), why would you have anyone but Carlos Ezquerra color Carlos Ezquerra?

The above page is from a Garth Ennis Judge Dredd story called “Death Aid,” about a Bob Geldoff type throwing a fundraiser to help people die. This story features some of Ezquerra’s best art from the time period when he stopped trying to draw like Moebius and began REALLY drawing like Carlos Ezquerra.

His coloring defies belief; every bit as good as Lynn Varley’s on The Dark Knight Returns and so completely complementary to his already stunning linework and composition. He composes the pages with more than just line and space now, he does it with color, with an alacrity that a lot of paid, professional coloring guys at the major publishing houses completely lack. It’s not enough to know that orange and blue are complementary to one another, any asshole who’s ever seen a sunset can tell you that. It’s about knowing how to move from what orange to what blue, what effect that places on the story at hand, what color certain emotions and situations really are; you need to be a stage designer, a DP and William Blake all at the same time to be a great comics colorist. This comic is probably over twenty years old. Ezquerra’s had his craft down to an instinct longer than most of us have been alive.

A few gorgeous pages from the Hitman annual, 1997. Go buy a Hitman book so DC/Time Warner doesn’t have my guts out for using the pages.

My basic point is, Ezquerra is one of a very few of a kind when it comes to action, crime and sci-fi comics. He’s virtually a godhead, in my mind. The sheer breadth of his work is amazing in its own right, but he’s also the increasingly rare artist whom you look at and struggle to find something wrong with it, only to realize there is (subjectively, anyway) nothing he can’t draw. I can’t articulate well enough what I’m trying to say about him, other than a young cartoonist probably couldn’t ask for a much better role model if they’re moving forward in comics. He’s simultaneously as graceful as Mikhail Baryshnikov and as subtle as a slug to the chest. All of you kids who are gazing at Alex Ross, Jim Lee, whoever kids like these days, you’re looking at the wrong guy. Ezquerra’s your man. Even Frank Quitely, one of the single greatest artists to touch a mainstream book in the last ten years, owes a gigantic artistic debt to Ezquerra’s line.

Ezquerra’s been around for so long and done so much work that an actual retrospective on the guy, at least in blog form, is next to impossible. In my considered opinion, however, one has no business drawing crime or sci-fi comics in the west today without the influence of Ezquerra. He’s an enormously important figure in many ways. He created Judge Dredd, he broke the page apart in a whole new way and, like the Christopher Walken of comics, he never turned down an assignment. He’s been making the monstrously, insanely difficult look infuriatingly easy for decades. For my part, I don’t think he should be relegated in our memory to one of those workaday artists, part of the who’s who of artists who covered an issue here and there and were typically better than the regular artists. I think that time is going to reveal Ezquerra to be a very important artist as things swing around again. As artists like Von Eeden and Ditko, Kaluta and even Art Adams are being viewed with a whole new appreciation, I think Ezquerra deserves a closer look. To be honest, for my money, Ezquerra is as important a figure for me, personally, as Neal Adams or someone like that is to a straight superhero guy. To me, Ezquerra is one of the all-time bests. Anything he’s involved with is immediately better for having him.

I don’t know, maybe we’ll see a resurgence in sci-fi crime comics. Anything’s possible, I guess. I kind of want to make one after writing this. Nathan, what are you doing tonight?

I can't think of a single compelling reason that comic book covers no longer look like this

Thriller was ostensibly another rung upon the ladder of DC Comics’ ascent towards maturity, a word they took to mean the precipitate acquisition of credibility. For the vast world of mainstream comics, this was a hitherto unprecedented time for unconventional work to slip beneath the radar into reader’s hands. Normally, focussing on the business end of a given period in comics is the most jejune and stultifying portion in a given rant, but Thriller was one of the Direct Market’s promethean figures. The Direct Market, capitalized out of respect rather than grammatical correctness, was how DC and Marvel saved themselves from Reaganomics while simultaneously paving the way for a decade and change of grim, humorless comics that looked less like John Buscema had drawn them. Simply put, the Direct Market was a means by which comic shops would cater to older audiences. Comics geared towards an older demographic would be prevalent, as would related memorabilia (i.e. bric-a-brac), subscription opportunities and a sense of community for twenty-somethings before Watchmen came out. The Direct Market has been enthusiastically absorbed by most comic shops still in existence. The system plainly has its faults, but from the mid 1970s into the 80s (or even 90s) this particular demand supplied no shortage of terrific artists, freed from the strict guidelines of a typical DC or Marvel comic book.

With that obstreperous introduction we come to the glorious mess that is Thriller number eight. It’s hard to imagine a comic this good blossoming from any other artist under the circumstances. The original writer, Robert Loren Fleming, had left the book due to a lack of communication with TVE (Trevor Von Eeden), replaced by the bombastic and wholly unprepared Bill Dubay. Dubay is probably best remembered for uniquely pornographic horror books from the 1970s on. Among his more recognizable contributions to the medium include work on Vampirella, a book that maintained this tone throughout its decades-long run:

This is not to disparage Bill Dubay as a writer; Simply to say that he was flung into the midst of a book that he was not yet qualified to write. Robert Fleming’s writing was more subdued, at least by the standards of 1984 (a year that gave us Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, The Church and State run on Cerebus, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Comics’ perplexingly non-reprinted The Muppets Take Manhattan: I have not yet lost hope, however). Moreover, in microcosm, this book presents much of the trouble that befalls any mainstream comic that is not permitted to live and die as it is. Not every artist or writer in comics commands enough editorial support (i.e.; revenue in the comic shops) to pilot a book where their vision demands it might belong. For every Alan Moore and Peter Milligan (neither of whom got off completely unscathed, incidentally: see Moore’s Prime from the early 90s or Milligan’s highly underrated Shade the Changing Man for example), there are a dozen Robert Loren Flemings and Trevor Von Eedens.

Thriller, for my purposes, is strongly emblematic of the rank and file orders at a large (ubiquitous) publishing house. And Thriller number eight is one of the messiest, most gruesomely beautiful examples of this money-as-the-bottom-line mentality. I didn’t know it when I first picked the issue up, but this actually wound up being Von Eeden’s final issue on the series. As he was drawing it, he was fighting to dissolve the contract he had signed with DC, and it shows in a jaw dropping way. Von Eeden is not John Byrne or Buscema. He is not a clean artist who allows his understanding of anatomy and perspective to be the salient pieces of the greater artistic whole. To be honest, as a hard-working comics artist myself, I can say with utter deference and humility than Von Eeden was on another fucking planet.

Thriller number eight, page one

As a first page, this is a rattlesnake bite, this is whiplash from a car accident. The unforced page composition is a sudden spike on a heart monitor, the delicately hushed purple in the first panel (the only “traditionally” shaped panel on the page) is about the only nod we receive upon opening this book that this is a comic by a mainstream publisher, with mutually understood precepts and notions about what a comic should be. From there, it’s all Von Eeden. The role played by color in this book will obviously be discussed at greater length as this post continues.

Thriller number eight, page two

Scans of this work will do it very little service; all I can recommend is that you go to Desert Island Comics on Metropolitan Avenue and Union Avenue, and see what Gabe’s got in his longboxes that day.

The story in Thriller is subsumed by Von Eeden’s artwork, which is why I’ve neglected to mention it extensively. It’s the story of a group of young go-getter American mercenaries fighting a dire Russian threat, with all of the grim gallows humor readiness and indefatigable skill that make this sort of story so much damn fun. Thriller herself appears entirely as a face in the sky giving orders and delicate suggestions to her charges, the aforementioned team called “The Seven Seconds.” (Tagline: “She’s got seven seconds to save the world.”)

Robert Loren Fleming was quoted as saying “In a compromise to the nature of the medium, I’ve cloaked my characters in a wardrobe of almost preposterous powers and pretenses, hopefully keeping one foot planted in the hard-edged, realistic world of the pulps.” I can’t remember where this quote came from at present, but if you read this and I stole it from you, thank you.

Thriller number eight, page three

This seems as germane a place as any to discuss the role of color in this book. If your screen is large enough to do so without scrolling down, stop reading the page. Trace with your finger the directional flow of the solid black areas, across the two top panels, down the third, across the fourth, all the way down. Now examine the colors. The values, the placement. To digress momentarily, it’s no mistake that David Mazzuchelli is a child of the 1980s, and in Asterios Polyp (a book that deserves its own post elsewhere) he takes completely onboard the way that complementary colors of the same value can lead a reader across the static field of a comics page, and even through an entire story. I tend to think that without his work-for-hire days at the larger publishers during this period, Polyp would have been a very different book, or perhaps not even have existed at all.

The unsung hero of this issue is Tom Ziuko, the endlessly creative and intuitive colorist. Von Eeden was plainly working at breakneck speed on this issue, and Ziuko seems to be the only staffer who was effortlessly keeping pace with him. The copy of the book that I have is worn and old, with crinkled pages and an incredibly washed-out cover. Ziuko’s coloring sings, however, in such a simplistic and unique way that it’s almost hard to place his discipline. Ziuko is decidedly not a Sienkiewicz child in his approach to coloring. It’s a salt, old distribution of compositional weight that owes more to the unsung colorists of the 50s through the 70s; these colorists, along with the letterers, were probably forced to be the fastest workers on a given book. Many of them colored several books a month, which would put their output somewhere around a finished book every two days (after the writers and artists had handed it off to them), a statistic that should make us all feel like we aren’t working hard enough. Ziuko obviously had a little more time to worry about it. The coloring is incredibly simple; Little to no gradation, flat areas of color that contribute a nearly abstract feel to the design, and an obvious understanding of how the audience reads a comic. The visual cues that guide us across a page can be as simple as always coloring one character the same way so we know who we’re following, or applying a seemingly incidental color to a compositional cross-section designed by the artist to lead us to the logical following panel or page. In this particular case, and many of the pages to come, watch the purple and yellow. Notice how they are used almost entirely as pathfinders for our eyes. Simply put, as far as the artwork in this book goes, there are no arbitrary choices.

Thriller number eight, page nine

The writing reminds me strongly of early sixties Stan Lee (cough) insofar as the writer seems to think that only through a tremendous amount of visual information on a page can the “point” get across. Luckily, Von Eeden is one of the great masters of making loads of imagery not only legible but beautiful. Two characters of devious means are observing a party being held by the Russians with a cast of hitherto unmentioned figures who appear only sporadically in the remainder of the book. This approach could, very charitably, be compared to someone like Thomas Pynchon, an old stoner of a writer who loves nothing more than overwhelming a readers senses and forcing them to read differently, just letting the narrative happen to them. It’s at this point that the story becomes nearly illegible, however, and earns repeat readings. Characters appear and vanish in an appropriately paranoid fashion, and where I once thought the book began to fall apart is in fact where it really picks up steam and becomes something meaningful and even more unique. Howard Chaykin (whom I plan to post on as well) used this technique to greater effect, most notably in his series The Shadow. Even Alan Moore, who is, somewhat unfairly, remembered as the greatest single mainstream contributor to the medium from this time period, was known to let the tone of the times, the paranoia and the threat of imminent world destruction, dictate the overwhelming nature of some of his stories. However, as dense as their respective works can be, both Chaykin and Moore are strong, concise writers who understand comics better than most. Literary formalism was on the rise in this period, and while I think Dubay is a fine writer in his own right, he understandably got a little lost in trying to stay true to Fleming’s ideas while contributing his own at the same time.

Thriller number eight, page fifteen

The book’s most jarring moments near the end of the issue, when Von Eeden begins using a traditional comics grid. The actions occurring here plainly demand less of his sharp, pulsing compositions, but the effect is still disarming. I talked earlier about how the first panel was one of the only indications that this book was still a traditional comic, and I stand by that. This sudden change from the page designs that made Von Eeden a latter day comics god put the reader on edge, waiting for everything to explode once more. At first I assumed this was merely Von Eeden rushing to get the book done. I can see now that whether he wanted to be off the book or not, VE was and remains a professional and the story dictates the compositions, not the other way around. I believe it’s a poor indication of our times that the work-for-hire comics artists are virtually no more, and that it’s almost more of a gag when a skilled artist works on a mainstream or atypical book. And beyond that, as you must tire of me saying, just look at that composition.

Thriller number eight, pages seventeen and eighteen

There are certainly more apparently creative double-page layouts in the book, but something about this one drew me in. Looking at it for me, I see a continuous pulse in the blacks, up and down, once again, like a heart monitor. This is plainly no accident. The word balloons, colors and even the action are given a sense of space and hidden dread by this bizarre, advanced framing technique. The foresight required to seamlessly execute a composition of this caliber is staggering. There are people in comics now (myself somewhat included) who build their entire bodies of work around disciplines like this, using hidden narrative imagery and an old visual language to make the work ring. It’s a valid way of going about the work, and I think it will yield mostly good results as time goes on. But this book was drawn twenty six years ago, and the level of expertise is staggering. I respond emotionally to visual cues like this, and in that regard, Thriller number eight almost makes me want to cry. And what eighties comic is complete without a Russo-Chinese boy in military garb half consumed by a computer that keeps him alive?

Thriller number eight, page twenty three

The final page of the book, and the ending is as abrupt as the beginning was poetic. I feel like this was the most rushed page of the book, but with that said, it scans. Speaking of which, I apologize for the poor quality of the images presented. I don’t have ready access to a scanner and I had to photograph them with my sister’s camera. The Seven Seconds have saved the girl who was shot down on the third page, and they’re fleeing Russia in a garishly red helicopter bound for doubtless trouble. By the next issue, Von Eeden is gone and the artist Alex Nino (who is quite admirable in his own right, and his work on Heavy Metal is among the book’s strongest) has taken over. I’ve skimmed these remaining issues in back issue racks, and they look good. They look occasionally great, even. But by comparison to the Von Eeden issues, they do very little for me. Nino has a background more in illustration and Dubay is just as excitable as ever, but something about it just doesn’t click. Interestingly, this issue features a hilarious correspondence on the letters page from John Holland of Gretna, Louisiana.

“One worry I have is that is THRILLER fails, the blame (or a large share of it) will be placed on Trevor Von Eeden. The anti-THRILLER reviews all seem to zero in on Trevor’s art as their favorite topic to dislike, saying that it just makes an already confusing story only that much more confusing…” “…Trevor’s art. He is trying to experiment with the layout of the page, perhaps make things less linear, but still understandable. For if you can’t understand it, what’s the sense in reading it?…” “Has Trevor been asked to tone it down a little?”

An strange standpoint from a strange time. Nowadays, whether we know it or not, we’re influenced by Von Eeden’s work, especially if working in an action or crime comic. Frank Miller didn’t emerge fully formed from nowhere, and neither did anyone else. It’s difficult to imagine the effect Von Eeden’s art might have had on young readers in the early to mid 1980s. But then again, Frank Santoro turned out okay.

This post may not seem complementary to the tone of this blog up until now, but comics aren’t movies and I’m not Nathan. I read this over and it seems a little thin; I think I need to gather all twelve issues of the book at some point and write something more intelligible about the series as a whole. As it stands, the only issue I own is decidedly the most transitory. The old writer was out, the new one was in, the old artist was on his way out and there was no indication of what was going to happen next.

I want to finish with briefly discussing where Von Eeden came from, and how it applies to Thriller specifically. By this point in his career, Von Eeden was borrowing less directly from his influences and forging his own path more confidently. He speaks eloquently about how he was brought into to DC to help create the often-satirized character of Black Lightning. He assumes (I tend to think correctly) that this is because he’s a black man. That’s fairly indicative of the intellectual tambre of the major publishing houses at the time. He went from that to work on books like Black Canary, Green Arrow and Power Man and Iron Fist (for those unaware of the bitter irony, Power man is the superhero name for Luke Cage, who looks like this):

He exhibited a compositional sense well beyond his years, even at these early junctures. VE is probably in his fifties now, so he would have had his “Oh shit I can do this” moments when John Byrne was on X-Men, Neal Adams was on Batman and, maybe most importantly, Jim Steranko was leaving a psychedelic mess everywhere he went. He doesn’t list Steranko as one of his influences, so perhaps it’s just conjecture on my part that suggests there might be a connection. Regardless, I tend to think of them being associated. Neal Adams had that great sense of activating the page with his dynamic, assymetrical and jagged compositions, but VE and Steranko tore the page apart. Steranko was a magician, literally and artistically. Von Eeden was an excited kid thrilled to be drawing comics. At his most flawed, Steranko produces stiff, unconvincing work. I’d be hard pressed to think of a time that those words could ever apply to Trevor Von Eeden.

But I digress. the point of this is not to compare Von Eeden to Steranko, favorably or otherwise. It’s more to talk about the unspoken narrative that flowed from McCay to King to Gould to Ditko to Steranko to Von Eeden, and beyond Von Eeden to a tremendous number of artists like McFarlane, Sam Keith, Frank Santoro, the Fort Thunder crowd and beyond. Page activation, folks. That’s what it’s all about.

I apologize for the gratuitous length of this post. My next ones will be more concise and different comics abound!

Upcoming posts:

Howard Chaykin’s The Shadow

Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s The Punisher

Grant Morrison and Chris Erskine’s The Filth

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher

Garth Ennis megapost.

Possibilities: Jack Cole’s Spirit knockoff, whose name escapes me at present.

Gary Panter’s Cola Madnes.

And many, many more.

1.

Watching a film that is very evidently not working is a truly strange experience,  a little like getting on the wrong bus in a town you only thought you knew in the first place. One’s heart starts to shrink in one’s chest as the bus rolls on and on, the buildings becoming less and less familiar.  Such is the sort of feeling I associate with watching the 1982 version of A Bout de Souffle (1960); an odd, sour film, the remake, that is perhaps more interesting for whatever thoughts may stir in the mind of the confused viewer than anything occurring directly on screen.

2.

An old joke about a dancing bear. The bear puts on a tutu and dances around; everyone in the audience claps. The trick – the reason for the applause is not necessarily that the bear dances so very well.

3.

There was a time when a remake of Breathless, directed by Jim McBride, would have carried with it a good deal of interest. That time would have been somewhere around 1973 – McBride had, at that point, released two documentary/fiction hybrids, David Holtzman’s Diary and My Girlfriend’s Wedding, independent films that seemed significant at the time and still remain fascinating when seen today. He followed these with Glen and Randa in 1972, a post-apocalyptic feature that might be best described as a nudity heavy, humorless American version of Richard Lester’s overlooked masterpiece The Bed-Sitting Room. By the director’s own admission, most of the cast and crew of Glen and Randa were stoned through the majority of the shoot. By 1982, though, he had been on the losing end of a decade of failure; a Western about fur-trappers called “Gone Beaver”, which would have centered around an entire invented language of “trapper talk,” never happened — if it had, we can assume it would have turned into either a career-killing fiasco like Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, or a simply forgotten side note, like Monte Hellman’s China 9 Liberty 37.  One more failure, this one actually shot and screened for the public – A Hard Day For Archie – followed, and then this.  Brathless (1982).

If we think about it a little, Godard’s career trajectory isn’t all that different. His triumphs of the 1960s fed directly into a 1970s wilderness of Maoist ideology and strangely disinterested  political dogma. He would emerge from that decade with a genuine second wind, a series of films that would easily rival his “classic period” of the ’60s for concentrated interest and achievement.  Whereas the earlier string of films impressed audiences with their romantic sense of youth, kinetic energy, their fierce sense of engagement with the “issues of today” (even to the point of ideological incoherence), the later films adopted a decidedly wintry tone, an old man’s view of history and an increased sense of removal from anything relating to popular culture at all.

An imaginative viewer could, mind lost somewhere in the throws of Gere-mugging-as-Belmondo, try to imagine an adaptation of Breathless by an aging Godard himself, in the days of Haild Mary and Detective. Such a film would very likely seem so foreign to the style and tonaliyt of the original that would out have a hard time imaging these films to have been made by the same person at all.

4.

Las Vegas, a car stolen, a hideous blue suit, all bathed in red. The driving sequenes, shot against rear-projection screens more transparently artificial than anything outside of an Edgar G. Ulmer poverty row C-film. Gere lets loose a bizarre torrent of mannerisms; where Belmondo worshiped Bogart, Gere attempts to channel Jerry LeeLewis. This is obviously a point of interest for McBride, who would go on to direct   Great Balls of Fire, a somewhat misbegotten 189 biopic revolving around Lewis’s rise to fame, while cutting off the narrative before the singer’s life took it’s legendary turn towards murder and insanity (or perhaps some kind of pun in translation, a remake of a French film using Jerry Lee Lewis, where the French are often mocked for their love of the great Jerry Lewis; such a pointless joke, it would be a tragedy if it weren’t true). Where the “hypnotically ugly” Belmondo looks toward icon of cool Humphrey Bogart as his personal model, pretty boy Richard Gere chooses a twitching rock and roll musician; the difference between the two is the distance between studied detachment and grotesque engagement, and I’m not sure the film knows quite what to make of the switch.  Belmondo purses his lips over and over again,  even while standing in front of a poster of Bogart’s last film, while Gere copies his idol by twitching erratically and shaking his hips in place. Belmondo’s hero, we instinctively sense, is a reprehensible human being, although the style of the film lends us to sympathize with him more often than not. Gere, on the other hand, is borderline repulsive throughout. If we are to allow that the effect is somewhat fascinating, it’s at least somewhat because we as an audience can never feel sure of whether or not the people making the film have any real control over the tones in play, or the iconography they invoke.

5.

It may be telling that, while Godard layers his film with classical images of feminine beauty and chooses for his lead a woman who had started her career by playing St. Joan, McBride has little to no iconography to attach to his heroine, other than a few strange reflective shots and lots of nudity (Gere gets plenty, too). Gere is constantly attached to references to Jack Kirby’s 1960s work on “Silver Surfer.” Dropping Kirby’s art directly into a middlingly successful film is a dangerous thing; his work looks wildly current, pulsating with energy, vital in a way that would be beyond the ability of even the most talented film makers.

6.

One of the great realizations made by Godard in course of making A Bout de Souffle was a critic’s realization, or merely that of an engaged viewer, and a concept that we have discussed in passing on this site. Namely, that the cops and robbers play acting in genre film after genre film, from Raoul Walsh and Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller,  is just a convenient narrative framework for broader, more personal, human concerns. Godard employed the basic rules of the game – cops and robbers, doomed heroes, love on the run, guns – but shifted the emphasis even further; the betrayal and death at the end of his film read less as the dramatization of a violent killing than as a metaphor for the transience of young love and romantic betrayal.

For a film as rough in technique as it is, Godard’s film is vertiginous in the depth of thought it can provoke. Released at the dawn of a new kind of “youth culture,” the flowering of a new kind of mass media, A Bout de Souffle can easily be used as a Rosetta Stone for the last half century of narrative film, if not more than that. On one hand you have a small string of obviously indebted art films – early Fassbinder, Kaurismaki, Kluge and Oshima, even early Jim McBride would be unthinkable without Godard’s example. On the other hand is a generation of “movie brats,” young men and women (largely men, one suspects) looking for the articulation of a sensibility that they had not yet seen in a feature film. From Scorsese and De Palma to Steven Spielberg, the new auteur films that would start to take over Hollywood in the late ’60s and through the ’70s would be knowingly referential, post-modern, personal in that you get the sense that for these young men referencing the films of the past is the easiest way to decode their own feelings and experiences.  If this trend starts with Greetings and Who’s that Knocking?, it would close the ’70s with Jaws and Star Wars, two films undeniably born from this way of viewing the world through film, and which seem, from the point we stand at right now, to have charted the grand trajectory of what we think about as mainstream film ever since,with no end in sight.

7.

When Richard Gere is about to die, in this film, he dances in front of the policemen’s guns. We can assume that they shoot, that he dies, although the film withholds the dubious pleasure of bullets striking the flesh of our gaudy, thrusting hero. What a strange sight it is, him dancing like that, surely knowing that’s he’s about to die.  Does he really know? Does he understand what this means? He kills a policeman at the beginning of the film, after all; there is nothing in the rest of the film to suggest this fact weighs on his conscience,that it is a cause for regret or reflection. His girlfriend gets the moments of reflection, here and there, those isolated shots of leaves ruffling in the wind with the music “adapted from” the work of Phillip Glass, poor Valerie Kaprinsky, who looks like a deer in the headlights in each and every shot in which she appears. Deer in the headlights, and she still comes off better than he does.

For the sake of writing  another post about a movie featuring an outsider police officer, we’re going to follow Kathryn Bigelow into the murky world of the 1990s, and the steamy pit of the ‘thriller genre,” that deeply hazy classification which for our purposes will refer to that strange group of films that coalesced around the release of “Fatal Attraction” and the adoption of VHS as a significant viewing format. Bigelow had directed the cult “vampire western” Near Dark several years earlier, with even stranger times ahead in the form of Patrick Swayze, sky-diving, and Point Break. Blue Steel crawls around there somewhere in the middle,  a film that’s simultaneously audacious and strangely tentative, especially for a director who’s early work seemed so fully formed.

This statement may perhaps seem more critical than I intend it to, but: Blue Steel is the kind of film that practically demands analytical interpretation by the simple fact that it would be an unbearably frustrating experience otherwise.  Story wise, it’s a fairly simplistic thriller in the Fatal Attraction mode: Jaimie Lee Curtis plays a young woman who’s just graduated from police academy, to the chagrin of her unimpressed mother and (apparently abusive) father. On her first day out she shoots an armed robber; another man at the scene of the crime, crazy eyed Wall Street day trader Ron Silver,  picks up the suspects gun. Obsessed with Curtis, who has been disgraced by management who think she’s shot an unarmed suspect,  he woos her even as he uses the stolen gun to murder people, using bullets with her name scratched onto it.  The film then moves forward with the expected cat and mouse sequences, swarming with coincidences and improbabilities, until diving into the expected last act action sequences and denouement.

When the film works at its very best the more problematic script choices are interesting – Silver flies Curtis around in a helicopter above midtown Manhattan, a sequence  only referenced by one perfunctory dream sequence in the middle of the film. The fact that this is never tied back into the script is almost mind boggling — the standard vocabulary of the thriller asks that each narrative element eventually be used as part of the giant suspense mechanism; if a gun on a mantle in act one must be fired by act three, logic would more or less demand that the villain having access to a helicopter would play a significant part in the narrative as a whole.  This leaves the interested viewer grasping for straws – was this part of an earlier draft that was never discarded? Is it a metaphor? For what? Eventually we’re ready to more or less throw our arms up in the air and come to the conclusion that this gesture is simply another part of the film’s visual palette; that while Curtis’s policewoman is dazzled by the glowing lights of the city, Bigelow is using every fog filter and icy blue gel set to seduce us in exactly the same fashion as Silver’s crazy Eugene Hunt. With nearly every single shot so forcefully stylized, the narrative elements that would otherwise fall into crush a lesser film instead begin to lend Blue Steel an odd, fever dream intensity, a world where a woman can make a simple choice and be plunged into a twisting nightmare version of single urban life.

Bigelow’s saving grace is her formal control – the psychology behind Ron Silver’s murderous stalker so broad that it’s almost cartoonish, with several instances of crazy eyed emoting that would shame a Looney Tunes caricature of Peter Lorre  — but she excels and pinpointing and isolating the most loaded and iconic images in the narrative world, so identifying her characters with their fetish icons of choice that it’s tempting to attempt a discussion of this film entirely through semiotics.

That would be an undertaking, though, and I have my doubts as to how far it would lead.  Certainly these elements are apparent in her first film — Wilem Dafoe admits that he’d be nothing without his motor bike, remember, just like Curtis wears her new uniform like a second skin and both protagonists cherish their guns like physical extensions — they are only unique within this genre based on just how far Bigelow is willing key her style to emphasizing them above all else.

Think, though — every single film we have discussed on this site thus far includes violent death; with the exception of the Zatoichi films, set in Feudal Japan, each film centers on the act of drawing or firing a gun as something of central importance.  By placing violent death by gunfire at the heart of these films, almost all of which are so aestheticized that the experiences dramatized therein would hardly be recognizable even to those few audience members with firsthand experience of violent death, these films raise the question of, just what is going on? This is something that gets asked a lot – this article by the A.O. Scott came out just yesterday — but often through a state of finger wagging or confusion, both of which we would very much like to avoid.  Instead, we would like to pose it as an open question for this site and all four of its readers,even if I only plan to keep moving towards an answer through steady accumulation of related detail, a goal which is not miles away from the style of this film at all.

A genuinely strange film as only passion projects by one-time-only directors in the early 1970s can be, Electra Glide perversely inverts the Easy Rider formula by focusing on the lives of two doomed motorcycle cops in the dead end town of Stockman, throwing out most of the forward drive expected of the genre in favor of increasingly mordant character study and exercises in American/Western iconography. Shot with monument valley ever on the horizon, legend has one time director/producer/composer Guercio — best known for his work with Chicago, with Moondog and the Firesign Theater — giving up all but a dollar of his director’s salary in order to court the services of cinematographer Conrad Hall.  This may have been a wise choice, as the film moves dream-like through a world built almost entirely out of iconographic symbols , in which characters are defined by the uniform that they wear, and in which our protagonist — star-crossed character actor Robert Blake playing the just as star crossed John Wintergreen — finds his life defined almost entirely by one supremely visual trait, his incredibly short stature.

Like many of the films produced in this part of the ’70s, Electra Glide is almost bizarrely bleak in tone and suggestion. The film plays on Western iconography — the film ends on a freeze-frame/fade out on monument valley after all, and the shift from the lawman protagonists riding horses to motorcycles is clear enough — but there are significant shifts of tone and intimation from that genre. More or less every single Western is somehow about the act of colonization, of taking untamed frontier and turning it into civilization; there is a marked shift in tone, starting more or less in the 1950s, that starts to take a more ambivalent view of the cost of this process, but even then those films must acknowledge that there is a future for this land, since the country is still standing, after all. That sense of becoming is absent and gone here; many Westerns may show their frontier towns in decay, but here that decay is terminal. Looking at the lives shown to us, the houses in which they live, those roads which they drive down, it becomes very hard for us to imagine any kind of future for these people, or the community in which they live (but most long to leave).

Barely taking the time to see to its own plot — the central killing is set up in the first five minutes, not touched for another half hour, resolved without much conflict, its consequences dealt with in one strange, blunt scene five minutes before the film is over — the film is more than content to place its emphasis where it counts, which in this case is watching “Little Chief” Wintergreen artlessly navigating situations of compromise,  in which he never manages to make a choice that feels right, even when he starts trying to do the right thing. The straight world, as we see it, is filled with drunken bigots, obsessed with their careers and fading manliness, abusing their authority when they can, always driven by pride, boredom, frustration. The kids, despite not having any authority they can abuse, don’t seem much better; they’re inarticulate, dirty, a little bit pathetic, and we sense it’s not a mistake that the only animal glimpsed at their dirty little compound is a pig.  Poor Wintergreen, already  a hopeless outsider merely in light of his physical height, starts off the movie desperately wanting to move up in the ranks — when he gets to be Detective Harv’s driver he dresses himself in a shot sequence that plays as near ecstatic, his white stetson hat illuminated by glowing light — but soon gives up on those dreams when he sees how much compromise they would entail. Poor Wintergreen seems to long for a middle road, but this is a view of America where trying to do the right thing only means that everyone feels wronged.

As for the ending — well, this was the 1970s, but it really isn’t that arbitrary at all. Wintergreen has just shot his best friend, after all, who stole drug money from the crime scene to purchase the only thing that he dreams about, the blue Electra Glide of the film’s title.  Just Zipper at the beginning decides to plant drugs on the man in the bus for no other reason than to teach a hippie wise-ass a lesson, the boys in the same van aim their gun at someone who is just a cop.  After pulling away from Wintergreen’s corpse in what may be one of the longest such shots in any American film, the frame freezes on Monument Valley and slowly fades, first to sepia, then to black.  Portentous though it might be, the gesture seems so deeply ingrained  in the film, and in this mode of film making as a whole, that it’s almost impossible to imagine the film without it; you can imagine the writers crafting the screenplay, working backwards from here, a short dead cop on a lonely road, and filling in the details that led him there. Perhaps, in another world, he would end up with a genre all to himself.

Abel Ferrara’s 1987 Romeo and Juliet adaptation China Girl may seem a strange candidate for inclusion in the discussion of this site, but then Ferrara is a strange figure in general.  Most discussion of Ferrara’s work seems to paint him as a gritter little brother to Scorsese in his Mean Streets mode, a comparison that is almost born out by a small handful of Ferrara’s films — Driller Killer, maybe, but certainly Bad Lieutenant, the film he is most likely to be associated with now. It’s easy to forget, then, that Lieutenant was not only preceded by the so-florid -it’s-almost-abstract King of New York, and followed by the disastrous Dangerous Game,  a bizarre exercise in self loathing that managed to strand viewers in Ferrara’s twitching Catholic guilt without even the consolation of Lieutenant’s pulp narrative to help viewers through the murk (one of the benefits of the pulp ideom — viewers are willing to accept a certain level of  bizarre self-hatred from a coke addled corrupt policeman, but find it utterly inexplicable when asked to accept the same kind of behavior coming from a marginally successful director). Even earlier in the 1980s Ferrara worked on a few episodes of Miami Vice, and played a significant role in Michael Mann’s relatively overlooked follow-up series Crime Story; it is somewhere in the nexus of this all that we find China Girl.

A film that starts with a lyric-romanticized shot sequence of day lit little Italy, saxophone music included; a Chinese restaurant is opening north of Canal St., igniting a minor outbreak of violence among the working class hoods of the area. Being an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, there are a pair of star crossed lovers (an Italian boy and the Chinese girl of the title), who end up dead in the wake of the violence of their families.

That above is an image of our protagonist’s mother, surrounded by Virgin Marys, mourning the first death of a son she’ll see in the course of this film.  That image is in many ways a very clear view of many of the tensions at play in the film; for one thing, it’s such a piece of dreamy stylization, so apparently art-directed, that you the viewer are almost at a loss as to just how serious you are to take this thing. On the other hand, the image is completely, unnervingly engaged – this woman has just lost her son, we’ve seen a deeply uncomfortable death scene where he crawled bleeding up the stairs to die in his mother’s arms, not to mention the funeral sequence that came after — and the option to find a visceral impact in the image is absolutely there, if the audience is so inclined to follow along.

Now, we are not trying to paint Ferrara as a romantic, or say that he wears his heart on his sleeve. The movie has a bracingly cynical streak to it — the elders of the Italian and Chinese mob want no violence between their houses, the better to keep an eye on the pressing interests of their business games, a strategy that the generation just a few years older than our protagonists is at an absolute loss to understand (these businessmen, one character notes damningly, live on Staten Island). The young lovers, on the other hand, don’t care; they live in a multi-cultural city of the future as was only possible during the late 1980s, slow dancing to Run D.M.C. in sweaty night clubs like that’s the way the world just works.  Certainly within this seemingly thin plot we can see three different factions fighting for the soul of Manhattan; the most unsettling feeling that comes from watching this movie may be looking back from the perspective of 2010 and realizing which group won in real life.  Go down to Canal St. tomorrow and what do you see? Italians? Chinese? Tourists? Yes. We thought so.

Now, this film in many was works on a different level than many of the other films we discuss on this site. For one thing, it simply isn’t cool — it tries to hard, and has none of that exquisite detachment you might find in a film by Michael Mann, none of that worldly knowledge you find when your protagonist is played by Warren Oates or Lee Marvin.  But look further, at those street shots –

– all neon lights and rain-slick pavement, and you get this sense of vertiginous depth, like every single street corner breathes with the doomed passion of our protagonists, a sense of aestheticization that runs so deep that its impossible to figure on where it ends and begins. Is this somehow ridiculous? Yes, of course it is, and the film never shies away from admitting that. Dying for love at any age — let alone under 18 — is one of the more absurd choices anyone can make, and if these versions of Rome and Juliet are not quite able to make the choice to the same degree as their predecessors, they do chose to play these roles, being perhaps let down by a city growing around them in ways that no one would understand for decades.  Once those decades had passed, Ferrara would try to approach the same subject one more time, in his 2001 film R Xmas, but by then much of the thrill was gone. I do not mean to idealize a view of NY that we were not around to enjoy, or a kind of film making that will probably never live again, but I do feel the need to note that the version of NY seen in this film — real or not — is gone most entirely, and that no one will ever really be able to make films like Ferrara made in the 1980s, not even Ferrara himself.  I don’t know if that can or should be an argument for any one film in particular; I do feel strangely inclined to make it for this one right now.

As Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 war film The Hurt Locker has just managed to win the Oscar for Best Picture, it may be a good time to start looking back at her fairly large body of work, which – especially the four films she made between ’82 and ’91 — are of particular interest to this website. Even The Hurt Locker fits well within the discussion — it is closer to those odd pulpy mid-budget war films, like Merrill’s Marauders or Attack!, than any other film of recent memory. And it would not take a great deal of imagination to see Jeremy Renner’s Sgt., if born in a different time, showing up on Miami Vice as one of Crockett’s old army buddies – “I know he seems crazy Tubbs, but…”.  Often completely overlooked in favor of her interesting vampire western Near Dark is Bigelow’s first feature, co-directed with Monty Montgomery (best know to most audiences as having played the “Cowboy” in Mulholland Drive), which we will start to discuss immediately after the jump.

“Man, I was what you’d call…ragged.

I mean, way beyond torn up.

I wasn’t gonna be no man’s friend today.

Been outta storage about a year now, and

to me, this endless blacktop

is my sweet eternity. “

Perhaps the simplest way to explain this film is as a revisionist vision of the “biker film genre” — non-conformist bikers ride into town, rile things up with their violent and sexy ways, leave with a few bodies on the floor — and it manages to hit all of the expected notes for a post- “Scorpio Rising” entry into the genre — re-contextualized ’50s pop songs, the explicit connections made between black leather fetishism, advertising imagery,  and some kind of festering cultural malaise/ active death-wish coded into the above. The monologue we get from Wilem Dafoe towards the end of the film, where he describes being a young man putting explosives in the mouth of frogs just because it was beautiful matches (perhaps too literally)  the actions of the gang themselves; systematically engaging the people they encounter with threats of violence or predatory sexuality. The gang member who may be a cop killer — a dangling plot thread the film has little interest in clearing up — slides his knife into the vinyl seating of the diner booth –

– a gesture that is both perversely satisfying in an aesthetic sense, even as it serves no point and casually destroys property. Later in the film these men pass the time by playing a game in which they throw knives straight at each others feet, trying to get as close as possible while narrowly missing; the most intriguing aspect of this being not any kind of coded symbolism (which the film is canny enough to avoid using too blatantly) but the unavoidable sense that this happens all the time, being repeated over and over again in recurring versions of this scenario that stretch well into the past and future.  The primary confrontation — in the mode of thought that suggests interpersonal conflict should be the center of any proper genre, this is it — involves the bikers not as active protagonists, but as catalysts once removed. Dafaoe sleeps with a girl in an expensive car, her father is the local oil baron (as broad a caricature as one could hope to find on an episode of “Dukes of Hazzard”) who may have driven her mother to suicide and may be abusing her; she blows him away before a fight between him and the bikers can erupt; she then shoots herself through the mouth, just like her mother. The gang stands watching the shooting in the bar when it happens, shooting and cheering like an appreciative audience at an exploitation movie, firing their guns in the air in ecstatic little ejaculations while the local patrons scream. Their response is inter-cut with her silent reaction shots; it’s like she belongs to another movie,  perhaps a deeper and stranger movie, running parallel to this one all along.

The greatest act of revision done by Bigelow, beyond the sly subversion of the genre in the outline of the plot, is in the way she pushes and isolates the imagery, placing each character and their actions inside of a completely aestheticized landscape. The primary point being not that the landscape is loaded with advertising imagery, for example, but that all of the figures in the landscape, even the landscape itself, are so aestheticized that the advertising iconography feels like part of an unbroken whole, rather than an intrusion. The film moves slowly, deliberately; the first shot starts in a moment of repose, with Dafoe standing just off his bike in the early dawn, the camera panning up his body and onwards until he drives off and a long expanse of road is revealed, still water on either side. The delivery of his voice-over narration, especially the first monologue quoted above, is so unaffected and calm, at odds with the purple prose he is speaking; if this voice we hear on the soundtrack is really the expression of his interior thought process, then he’s even more adrift at heart than his actions and dialogue suggest.

After this first shot, when he approaches a parked by the roadside, tire blown,  taking her money and sadistically kissing and then leaving her, even then his actions seem rote, like he’s playing a role he barely inhabits. Everything about him is performative — just look at those sunglasses he wears; for a biker he seems incredibly well groomed, a perfectly masculine sex object.

It seems almost impossible to talk about Dafoe’s character without bringing up the subject of cool — something that lives  close to the center of so many of the films this site is interested in discussing. As  a concept it is borderline impossible to define, but the sensibility that seems most pertinent is cool as in literally cold blooded, sang froid , the kind that heroin chic icons Miles Davis and Chet Baker embodied in the 1950s, the same decade that would give us James Dean and Brando in The Wild One.  This sense of cool courses through the veins of The Loveless in a very strange way, a mix of the Chet Baker model of wounded detachment  (I am essentially above or other than the world; it I contradict it’s rules it is my prerogative to do so, since they hardly refer to me) and the James Dean model of intense, twitching engagement (I want to fuck or fight most everything in my way, and I will rebel against the rules of the world because they are in my way). While he constantly plays himself off as the latter style in his public interactions, what we know of the character from his monologues and private moments suggests someone completely detached, spiritually exhausted.

The above may be his  coolest moment in the entire film, when he’s picked up that girl at the gas station and he’s driving her beautiful car at full speed down that beautiful country road, he’s just drunk an entire bottle of Dixie beer (he bought it at a black owned bar, “I’m not as white as you think I am” he says to the bartender, who doesn’t seem to be buying it), and he throws it straight over his shoulder, letting it crash on the ground below. He is showing off, of course, to the girl yes but also to himself; he is indulging a fantasy that he knows on some level is wrong (he says he shouldn’t be in this car that she could never afford herself because he doesn’t condone “child abuse,” a joke that becomes much concrete real based on what she yells at her father when he bursts into  her hotel room — “He ain’t done nothing to me you ain’t done a thousand times yourself.” Dafoe barely registers these words, let alone act on them; he only flashes back to them late in the film, when it’s far too late.)

She shoots her father herself, then she goes outside, into her car and puts the same gun into her mouth. He stands and watches.

He doesn’t move. Instead, he remembers back when they were driving in the car together, and a single image of her sunlit face freezes onscreen.

He does not betray much emotion, if any, at this moment, but you can tell that that it’s going to sit there, inside him; maybe it will come out in the next town, or the town after that, but we can be more or less sure that it will come out.

So many of these films we write about traffic in a kind of deep seated spiritual exhaustion. Dafoe, from the first moment we see hm seems just about half alive; the town itself may be even worse, a dead-end purgatory for those without the resolve to get away.  They spend time there and what do we see of the town? A bar, a diner, a motel, a garage, a lounge; there is  somewhere in which these people sleep and carry on with their lives, but the gang are not interested, not invited in.  After all, no matter how much of a purgatory the town looks like, these people seem more engaged, more alive then the bikers. It’s easy enough to view these characters, the bikers, through the lens of the title, like Flying Dutchmen on Harley Davidsons, condemned to circle around for all of time, no hope of settling down. The fact that the broad contours of this description could be used to describe almost any film posted about on this website may speak volumes, in and of itself.