[John Carpenter’s movies provide visions of societies falling
apart. No wonder his work is resonating now more than ever.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

JOHN CARPENTER, APOCALYPTIC FILMMAKER  
[[link removed]]


 

Eileen Jones
November 27, 2020
Jacobin
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ John Carpenter’s movies provide visions of societies falling
apart. No wonder his work is resonating now more than ever. _

“It’s a documentary,” Carpenter is fond of saying. “It’s
not science fiction.”,

 

It may come as a surprise to those of us who always loved his films,
but the reputation of director John Carpenter wasn’t always so
sterling.

Today, Carpenter is universally regarded as one of the great American
genre filmmakers, the auteur of a half dozen gritty classics renowned
for their steady pacing, pulsing electronic scores, and raw action. In
an attempt to cash in on this new consensus, Hollywood has spent the
last decade announcing a flurry of remakes, reboots, and reimaginings
of his classic films.

In 2018, Blumhouse Productions’ Carpenter-sanctioned (and scored)
Halloween sequel brought in $255 million on a $10 million budget.
It’s now the highest grossing slasher film in history. And this
summer, that same studio announced it was working with Carpenter on
yet another reboot of one of his classics — 1982’s The Thing —
despite the fact that there was already a prequel made by another
studio less than a decade ago.

It’s quite a shift from the late 1990s, when Carpenter couldn’t
even get a low-budget film off the ground. By the turn of the
millennium, he’d faded out of filmmaking almost entirely. He is now
dedicated to a career in music, touring with his son, Cody, to perform
his increasingly celebrated film scores and other compositions
worldwide.

After such a steep fall from grace, how do we account for the current
widespread reverence for all things John Carpenter? You’d never know
now that the majority of his films did poorly at the box office. After
a cluster of major and minor hits in the 1970s and early ’80s —
including Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape From New York
(1981), Christine (1983), and Starman (1984) — Carpenter’s pileup
of commercial failures, such as Big Trouble in Little China (1986),
Prince of Darkness (1987), Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), In the
Mouth of Madness (1994), Village of the Damned (1995), Escape From
L.A. (1996), and Ghosts of Mars (2001), made him increasingly
unbankable and doomed his career.

Carpenter’s masterpiece, The Thing, was perhaps his most shocking
flop, ignored by audiences and widely dismissed by critics in that
tragic year of 1982, when Blade Runner also failed dismally. Americans
preferred the sunny and suburban E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to those
dark and dreary classics. According to one of Carpenter’s staunchest
admirers, director Guillermo del Toro, this failure “fragmented
Carpenter’s heart somewhat,” and he reported that Carpenter spoke
bitterly about his newly stellar reputation, saying, “What fucking
good does that do to me?”

In 2016, Del Toro posted a marathon series of twenty tweets in tribute
to John Carpenter, “a true auteur,” that began, “When I think of
John Carpenter, I am amazed at the fact that we take him for granted.
How can we? Why should we? He is lightning in a bottle.”

After praising individual Carpenter films in terms of their
“unsparing precision, simplicity and elegance” and the perfectly
“spare rhythmic punctuation” of his scores, Del Toro generates a
fusillade of tweets praising The Thing as the peak of Carpenter’s
achievements and saying “fuck them all” to the critics who
slighted it. He ends by saying, “Final thought for the day:
Carpenter creates masterpiece after masterpiece and they are often
ignored. Now, go to bluray church and pray.”

It’s not just Del Toro, either. Quentin Tarantino, Bong Joon Ho,
Robert Rodriguez, Olivier Assayas, Danny Boyle, Edgar Wright, Nicolas
Winding Refn, James DeMonaco (of the Purge franchise), David Robert
Mitchell (of It Follows), and Kleber Mendonça Filho (of Bacurau) are
among the filmmakers that have sung Carpenter’s praises in
interviews, cited his influence on their own filmmaking, and sometimes
adoringly referenced his films in their own.

Young people today tend especially to rave about Carpenter’s
so-called Apocalypse Trilogy: The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In
the Mouth of Madness. Those films, along with Halloween, Escape From
New York, and They Live, are probably the most cited as evidence for
his genius.

There’s a simple reason for that — they’ve aged well.
Carpenter’s apocalyptic outlook, which might have seemed overly dour
in the era of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, now
feels prescient. Coming out of the dashed left-wing political hopes
and failing economy of the 1970s with his cynical, antiauthoritarian
inclinations already developed, Carpenter began identifying the United
States as a failing state way back in the 1980s, concurrent with
Reagan’s two terms as president.

His most explicit attack on the American nightmare is the
pseudo-Marxist They Live, in which a working-class hero, played by
professional wrestler Roddy Piper, battles aliens who’ve cleverly
disguised themselves as the Reagan-era bourgeoisie. “It’s a
documentary,” Carpenter is fond of saying. “It’s not science
fiction.”

The film’s narrative conceit involves special sunglasses distributed
by an underground political organization that allow one to see the
aliens in our midst, controlling the human population with
sophisticated surveillance devices and omnipresent subliminal
messaging like “Consume” and “Obey” and “Do Not Question
Authority.” The sunglasses arose out of Carpenter’s desire for a
straightforward, tangible way to represent political awakening: “I
tried to put myself in the eyes of the revolutionaries. How can we
wake people up to the world that they’re in?”

But Carpenter’s dyspeptic views on American capitalism go beyond
They Live. Consider the antihero John Trent (Sam Neill) in 1994’s In
the Mouth of Madness. A callous and well-dressed insurance
investigator, Trent is so engaged in a lunch-hour conversation with an
executive that he doesn’t see the ax-wielding religious maniac
coming for him until the assailant breaks through the restaurant
window and lands on the table. The maniac is a former career man
himself, once the literary agent of an ultra-successful pop horror
writer named Sutter Cane and now a fanatical Cane worshipper.

There’s a grim underlying pleasure in watching Trent come undone as
he discovers that the works of Cane — a publishing phenomenon —
are unleashing a monster-ridden apocalypse straight out of an H. P.
Lovecraft story. “This book will drive people crazy,” he warns
Cane’s publisher. “Let’s hope so,” the executive replies.
“The movie comes out next month.” Trent ends the film in a movie
theater, watching himself on the big screen as nothing more than a
character in the sure-to-be hit adaptation of Cane’s latest novel
— not just any book, but a monstrous capitalist achievement with the
power to devour reality itself.

It’s no coincidence that politically left filmmakers should respond
so strongly to Carpenter’s films, or that increasingly left-leaning
young Americans keep returning to them. Carpenter’s characters are
typically working-class types, leading precarious lives that are
already difficult before the monsters in their landscapes reveal
themselves. Just think of protagonists such as hulking, sad-eyed
“Rowdy” Roddy Piper as John Nada, the homeless blue-collar guy
hunting for a job, who is befriended by black construction crew member
Frank Armitage (Keith David) in They Live. And think of the way Frank
groans contemptuously when Nada stubbornly insists that hard work and
perseverance will provide him opportunities, against all the evidence
of urban decay and human suffering around them, because, as Nada says,
“I still believe in America.”

The frequently noted “siege structure” of many Carpenter films,
entrapping the main characters in tight spaces ringed by multiplying
and intensifying sources of danger, is mirrored in our lives of
continual catastrophe — wondering where we can hole up to survive
pandemics, climate change disasters, a teetering economy, collapsing
civil rights and social programs, and the appearance of a political
swing toward breakdown and, possibly, fascism.

The city in Assault on Precinct 13 marks the beginning of this
structuring device for Carpenter. But he often complicates the
framework, with the source of danger infiltrating the confined “safe
space” early on, making it unclear whether one should stay in and
defend the refuge, break out and battle the complicating threat from
outside, or fight a two-front war.

Other Carpenter “siege structures” include the suburban house as
terror trap in Halloween, the Antarctic station infiltrated by a
body-snatching alien in The Thing, the church ringed by
demon-possessed homeless people in Prince of Darkness, and the
Manhattan of Escape From New York, a metropolis so degenerated by
poverty and crime that it’s been turned into a maximum-security
prison. It’s no wonder George A. Romero, with his many famous
“siege structure” zombie films, shared such mutual admiration with
Carpenter. Both fell out of Hollywood’s good graces just as the
Reagan Revolution was revving up, and both saw American society
careening toward its disastrous end way back when it was deeply
unpopular to do so.

Carpenter is certainly not a fancy director, and his stark, clear,
unfussy approach to filmmaking is easy to misread as a lack of
ambition. In fact, clarity is a rare and precious quality in a
cinematic world where pretentious, convoluted, symbol-laden
pontificating is taken as proof of intellect and importance — the
logic being that if a movie is hard to follow, it must be good.

In fact, Carpenter’s style is so clean-lined, you may miss his
expertise. He gets insidiously terrifying effects from seemingly
simple directorial choices. His preferred wide-angle shooting style
not only increases the impact of movement in action scenes, it’s
also deceptively “open,” giving us the vague sense that we’re
taking in the entirety of a setting even though we often can’t
locate the danger. Or else the danger is already present as an element
in the frame, yet it’s downplayed in a way that accentuates the
frighteningly deceptive “normality” of the surroundings.

In the original Halloween, the psychotic killer stands unnaturally
still in broad daylight but is largely unnoticed next to a tall fence,
or among the sheets hanging on a laundry line, or alongside young
children trick-or-treating with their parents.

You can see a similar kind of no-frills craftsmanship in the films of
Carpenter’s directing idol, Howard Hawks, who also specialized in
genre filmmaking, and who, in fact, was noted for being able to turn
his hand to seemingly any popular genre and work wonders. Carpenter
returns to Hawks repeatedly for both formal and narrative inspiration,
most obviously taking Hawks’s Rio Bravo as the basis for his own
Assault on Precinct 13, and inventively remaking the Hawks-produced
1951 monster movie The Thing From Another World as 1982’s infinitely
grimmer The Thing.

Carpenter’s adaptation, like Hawks’s, is based on the 1938 novella
Who Goes There? But his rendition is a wonder of insinuating terror
that removes every reassuring element from Hawks’s version,
particularly Hawks’s answer to chaos — which, in his serious,
action-oriented films, is generally the strength, professional
competence, and code of conduct of one man or a group of men who are,
or should be, experts at their work.

In Carpenter’s film, the members of the crew that first encounters
the alien are all dead almost as soon as the movie starts. And instead
of the alien assuming a single, stable shape (originally played by
Gunsmoke’s James Arness as a hulking Frankenstein’s Monster),
Carpenter opts for a shape-shifting creature. Anyone — or any living
thing — could be the alien. He begins his film with a tour de force
chase scene that starts from a slightly wavering Steadicam
point-of-view shot, looking up at a formidable, frozen cliff face.
Whose point of view is it? It turns out to be the alien, but in a form
that no one in the audience can yet recognize, or wants to recognize
— a lone husky running across frozen tundra, chased by an apparent
madman in a helicopter taking shots at the dog below.

The madman raving in Norwegian is killed by the American crew, in what
they think is self-defense. The dog is brought inside to shelter with
the other huskies, who whine in terror at the interloper but are
ignored. From then on, we witness total social breakdown in the
barracks, where it soon becomes clear that conditions are as deadly
inside as out, for the alien is on a stealthy rampage, occupying and
destroying the body of one crew member after another.

In the beginning, the men are shot in large, congenial groups. Then,
under the pressure of increasing paranoia and distrust, the groups
shrink to uneasy alliances of three men per shot, or just two, and,
toward the end, one — no man shares a “frame” with another, as
each fights a lone battle to survive the alien takeover.

In Hawks’s rendition, there’s no single hero. It’s a team of
equals. And their bond only grows stronger, until they finally defeat
the alien together. Hawks ends his film with the crew broadcasting a
warning to the world: “Watch the skies — everywhere. Keep
looking.” It’s the can-do spirit of an America fresh from its
victory in the Second World War.

Carpenter’s film, though, ends with his hero, R.J. MacReady,
tentatively rejoining forces with his chief rival for leadership,
Childs (Keith David), as they freeze to death, together in a frame,
outside their burning barracks. Their only mission is to live long
enough to prevent the alien from escaping the flames.

It turned out not to be a recipe for box office success. Carpenter
later expressed regret at his own attachment to such bleak endings,
suggesting that some of his films might’ve done better with
audiences if he’d given them more to be happy about at the end.

But Carpenter’s darkly ambivalent conclusions are entirely in
keeping with his overall vision — a society falling apart and, as a
result, the people devolving into paranoia, cynicism, and an
increasing inability to overcome distrust and fight back. Truly an
American filmmaker for our times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA.
She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.

SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]]

DONATE [[link removed]]

OUR NEW ISSUE, “FAILURE IS AN OPTION,” IS OUT NOW. WE DISCUSS WHY
THE UNITED STATES’ INSTITUTIONAL BREAKDOWN WON’T STOP AFTER TRUMP
LEAVES OFFICE AND WHAT CAN BE DONE TO IMPROVE THINGS FOR WORKING
PEOPLE. GET A $20 DISCOUNTED PRINT SUBSCRIPTION
[[link removed]] TODAY!

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit portside.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]